Population Control – Let’s talk some sense

We are 1.17 billion and continuing, where are we heading? We are heading to outscore China by 2050 says UN. For all Indians" kind notice China is 3 times larger than India in total area.

Finally our health minister Gulab Nabi Azad had at least a statement to make on Population control couple days back. He suggested couples to watch TV instead of having sex.

I"m not sure whether he was making a point or being sarcastic.

30 years have gone by when we first started efforts on population control, though the India had commendable vision on population, our government carried out the task very infamously.

All discredit and credit goes to one man late Sanjay Gandhi. For this sole reason no political parties want to raise this issue again and are reluctant to have their say categorically.

Immediately after Azad Saheb made his statements, media started to conduct the debates. The leftists said 'Development is the best contraceptive ' and rightists argued that development can not be reached to the bottom of the pyramid in immediate effect. So need some stringent actions.

Now that they have put their views, as commoners let us talk some sense now. Let us understand the factors that are causing population explosion. We have both good and bad news to talk.

If we try to understand demography of India, socio-economic classes, we could see some light why is that India growing its human species and depleting in other species. In spite India showed record growth of 10 pc the status of Indian poor remains same.

Good news is that educated middle class of India understood population theory very well, and studies shows that Kerala being highly literate state records low fertility growth.

So the inference can be drawn that except from educated middle class and above (of course not the literate fundamentalists), bad news is with rest of the people, the rest of socio economic classes had never understood the equation rather they lacked the awareness on the impacts of population growth.

They failed to cognize it as major issue of the country. Only people benefited from free condom kiosks were sex workers.

The fact why poor in India go on and on is very logical for them. Poor mother in India counts her breads by number of children she has, more the children, more is the bread. It"s logical for her to think like that as her family has no economic or social stability.

Next is the category of small farmers. Nowadays agriculture is difficult affair for farmers who have little land. Increased labor costs, decreasing labors as many are moving to urban, increased fertilizers and chemicals costs. So they don"t hesitate to give birth to third child as they want more people to work in fields. Next class is religious class; I need not to talk about this. So all these people together make huge pie in the population circle.

So, how can we overcome? Commissions after commissions are formed, they came, they studied, they reported. Reports of commissions will start loosing their relevance to current conditions before government has some concrete action plans, and fresh start by fresh government will take full five fresh years for just commission to get to the report.

So saga of inaction and apathy by Indian government continues, and pushes the problem towards deadlock. If it all government is interested in taking some serious actions (not like they did in 70s), It can neither go in left nor in right it need to go straight and very straight about the problem.

Government has to fragment the problem and solutions based on demographics, and strart addressing them in parallel rather relying on age old sequential methods.