India’s population boom is busting social welfare schemes

One of the scarier sites on the Internet is livepopulation.com. As the name suggests, it is a live tracker of the change in population. One can’t help but look with horrific fascination as the counter keeps ticking upwards by one with every passing second. Each upward tick is a new child, and the daily average is of almost 58,000 children, who will grow up needing food, water, shelter, schools, hospitals, universities, and jobs. How are we going to provide for 1.6 crore additional people every year?

Looking back at the 1970s, one can still recall the staid documentaries produced by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Film Division educating us on how India’s overpopulation will get the better of it, leading to a situation in the future where there won’t be enough food to go around for all. Among other things, it also promoted its line of contraceptives and family-planning schemes, and gave us the unforgettable slogan of ‘hum do, hamare do’. The few times one got to watch television, the message was the same: too many people, too little food, and if we keep growing at this pace, it will be a terrible future. 

Today, in the cities, most of us gawk when someone tells us they have three children. And, this cuts across socio-economic classes. One seems to be the norm, two far less frequent. The costs of bringing up a child are a deterrent. In rural India, the situation is different. While it may no longer be a large battalion of children, it is common to see families with four or five children. This again cuts across socio-economic clusters, and communities. It is also seen that the more educated and well-developed states have been showing a decline in population growth, while the Hindi belt in the North, with high levels of illiteracy and poor female literacy, have a higher reproductive rate. The average fertility rate (the number of children born to a woman) is 1.2 in Sikkim; 1.6 in Punjab and Kerala; 1.7 in Tamil Nadu and Goa; 2.3 in Madhya Pradesh; 2.7 in Uttar Pradesh; and 3.4 in Bihar. As it stands now, we are likely to overtake China in 2024.

The first census of independent India put the population at 361 million people. Life expectancy was 31 years. Infant mortality was as high as 50 deaths for every 1,000 births. People had more children simply because only a few would survive. But, independent India managed to devote some resources to improving health parameters. Life expectancy grew, and infant mortality started dropping. In 1970, India’s population crossed 553 million, and alarm bells started ringing. People began talking about the population explosion, and what needs to be done to control the surging numbers. 

Among the people who saw India’s booming population as a threat and a roadblock to India’s progress was Sanjay Gandhi. When Emergency was declared, he declared a personal war against population growth. And, part of this was enforced sterilisation.

Having suspended democracy, and the Constitution, Sanjay Gandhi’s directives were ruthlessly enforced by state governments. Government officials were given targets for sterilisation, and in most cases, these targets were met by sterilising people without their consent. 

Undertrials, students, old men, no one was safe. Coercion was high, villages were refused water for irrigation and families were not supplied with food rations if sterilisation quotas were not met. It is estimated that 6.2 million Indians were forcibly sterilised during the Emergency.

The biggest body blow that the Emergency delivered was not so much to democracy, which was restored and continues to be part of our DNA, but population control. For some reason, we have stopped talking about reproduction. And, as we stand to touch 1.5 billion people in 2030, we need to bring the population question back to the centre of the policy agenda. If we don’t, no matter what is done in terms of social welfare, it will never, ever, be enough.

The author works at the intersection of digital content, technology, and audiences