The Hindu : National : More is not merrier

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 13, 2005

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National

More is not merrier

By Goutam Ghosh

CHENNAI, FEB. 12. Nearly 14 years ago, on March 1, 1991, India's population crossed the billion mark. It was officially placed at 1,027,015,247. That was an achievement of staggering proportions, if what mattered was just numbers. But what matters is the availability of limited resources to an increasing number of people. India has 16.7 per cent of the world's population, but only 2.45 per cent of world's resources and 4 per cent of the world's freshwater resources.

If numbers could stun, then another jolt of reality could be added: an Indian is born every two seconds and by the end of a day approximately 42,434 Indians are added to the burgeoning figure.

According to official data, global population has increased threefold during the last century from 2 billion to 6 billion, but India's has increased five times, from 238 million to more than one billion. Around 3.6 million births a year are unplanned ones, because the implementing agencies — governments and non-governmental organisations — "are unable to take the contraceptive services to those who need them, seek them and are ready and willing to use them," says Population First, a Mumbai-based NGO.

Consider the Human Development Report 2004 (HDR 2004). Norway leads the pack of 177 nations with the highest human development index whereas India ranks 127 in the "medium human development" group of nations. Norway's per capita gross domestic product is nearly 14 times that of an average Indian who earns $2,670 (this number says nothing about the skewed distribution of income that results in nearly 80 per cent of Indians earning less than an equivalent of $2 a day or less than $730 a year). But Norway's population of 4.5 millions is 0.4 per cent that of India's. It has more than seven times the number of medical doctors for every lakh of population compared with India, and about 20 per cent of its population is less than 15 years of age compared with India's 33 per cent in that category.

Despite being located closer to the Arctic Circle (the freezing zone), all Norwegians have access to clean water, whereas 16 per cent in India do not have it. India's position may be better than that of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos or Papua New Guinea, but the fact remains that nearly 50 times the population of Norway do not have access to clean water in India, according to HDR 2004.

Despite all the advantages of a stable population, the question that remains is, if a stable population were so sought after, why should countries in the West, which rank high on HDI and have a stable population, offer incentives to their citizens to have more children?

It is in this context that Population First, the NGO (www.populationfirst.org) , prepared the documentary film "Queue." The 90-second film, funded by a grant from the Tatas, focusses on the inevitability of huge numbers reaching out to limited resources. The film begins with a person trying to dial a number and is greeted with an automated announcement "Please wait. You are in queue." The camera races through a core cluster of optical fibre cables and overhead wires and focusses on groups of people standing patiently in queues. The automated announcements are in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati and Tamil as the camera pans different groups waiting for some service.

The final image is that of a cluster of bodies waiting for cremation. The scene shifts to a home where a young woman discovers an elderly man lying inert, runs to him, and then screams to a younger man. The young man then tries to make a phone call and is forced to listen to the announcement: that he must wait because he is in queue. The circle is completed. The only voice-over during the short and intense movie is "Growing population is India's biggest challenge. Let's shorten the queues", in Hindi.

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