The "New" Population Policy In February this year, the BJP-led NDA governement presented it's new population

policy with much fanfare. Although claiming to incorporate new and more effective incentives for population stabilization, a close examination of the policy reveals that it is more a "population discrimination" policy than an effective population management policy. Lacking in concrete measures, the crux of the policy rests on denying states representation to parliament based on their population. In other words - the essence of the population policy is that by taking away the democratic rights of those states whose population is growing too fast - i.e. the states in the Hindi belt - these states will somehow find a way of controlling their population. This is both naive and absurd - even as it is discriminatory and unethical under India's constitution. The new population policy is but a sophisticated excuse for passing the buck - and for ensuring that nothing concrete is done.Rather than investigate why the Hindi-belt states have failed to control their population and what the centre could do to facilitate that process, the centre has taken to a cheap discriminatory formulation that essentially washes it's hands off the problem - as if India as a whole will be unaffected by unsustainable population growth in the Hindi-belt states. Is it merely coincidence that in this last "liberalization" decade, it is the Hindi-belt states that have seen the least growth in industrial investment. That virtually all new industrial investment even from the government has gone to the already more advanced states. Could it be that thislack of growth is preventing the state governments from adequately funding social programs that might contribute to poverty reduction and population control? Could it be that the BJP's unabashed support of obscurantist religious ideas is creating social resistance to modern birth-control and family planning methods. Could it be that the obsession with the Ram mandir is inculcating a new type of patriarchal value system under which men feel pressured to exhibit their manhood through procreating over and beyond their ability to actually care for their children. Could it be that this excessive focus on religion is drawing the poor further and further away from reality and from their own role and responsibility in making intelligent reproductive choices? Of course - these speculative questions are not intended to provide conclusive answers to the puzzling question as to why the Hindi-belt has slipped far behind in it's social indicators - but it cannot be left to the individual states to solve this problem. They may be victims of unequal allocation of capital and government resources that could be aggravating the problem. And besides, the consequences of over-population and urban migration are inextricably linked. India's metros like Delhi, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore etc. who absorb India's poor migrants from virtually all over the country cannot afford to simply stay aloof from this problem. The Population Crisis Few in India can deny that India is facing an intense crisis of resources. There is intense competition for the nation's limited natural resources that is leading to quarrels between states,

between communities and even families. Our land and water resources are being exploited to the hilt. The exploitation of our mineral resources is threatening our forests, nature reserves, and general ecology. Seventy percent of our energy resources need to be imported putting constant pressure on us to export more or face a currency devaluation. Over use of resources is contributing to natural disasters ocurring more frequently and with greater devastation. For many Indians, life is a big struggle just to put together the bare essentials for survival, and shortages of resources works most against the poor and underprivilged. Even as sections of India's middle-class struggle with scarcities - it is the poor and vulnerable sections of society who suffer most. As famine rages in many parts of India, reports from Gujarat and Rajasthan indicate that Dalit villagers are the last to get access to water. Reports also indicate that much of the burden of collecting water is placed on women who often walk for miles a day to fill a pot or two of water. It is true that better management of resources could reduce this problem - that states like Gujarat and Rajasthan have neglected traditional water-harvesting methods that could be vital to augment scarce water resources. Others have argued that if the Narmada project were to be completed in some acceptable form, that could alleviate such problems in the future. But even with appropriate development schemes and optimum utilization of scarce resources, it would be hard to argue, that on a per capita basis, India's natural resources are not becoming severely strained. So far, these resources have been shared in a very unequal way. Some Indians have the luxury of taking long showers twice or thrice a day - even their pets are bathed daily, and their cars scrubbed from top to bottom. Other Indians are lucky if they get to bathe once a week. And many Indians are lucky just to have access to clean drinking water. If in the future, India were to become a more egalitarian nation, and attempt to share it's waterresources in a fairer and more just way, it is evident that with projected population growth rates, it is unlikely that every Indian citizen will have access to a reasonable ammount of water every day. The same would be true of other precious resources like land, energy and scarce minerals. Twenty years ago, it may have been possible to argue that in a socialist system, the country would find the resources to provide every Indian citizen a comfortable life. Today, it is becoming more and more difficult to make such assertions with any degree of confidence. While there is no doubt that increased research and more ingenuous and creative management of our resources could be quite effective, we must accept that compared to most nations we are becoming exceedingly resource poor. To a large extent this is a result of the post-colonial division of the world. During colonial rule, Europe was much more densely populated than India, and it's population was growing faster. But Europeans had the option of migrating to the so-called "new world". Very quickly, Europe's excess population was absorbed by the US, Canada, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Some of the world's resource-richest places on the planet

were settled by European migrants, who then quickly closed their borders to nonEuropean migrants by enforcing racially biased quotas and other immigration restrictions. By the time colonized nations like India had won independence, and begun to improve their national health system (leading to rapid population growth), the borders in the "new world" were closed to them. As India's life expectancy has doubled from 31 to about 62 in 50 years, and it's infant mortality rate fallen dramatically, it's population has grown to almost a billion. But except for a small trickle - most Indians cannot expect to migrate to "greener pastures". They must endure life on one of the most densely populated resourcelimited lands on the planet. Even as "globalization of the media" has created amongst many Indians the desire for a more comfortable and even extravagant life-style, our growing population makes it almost impossible for anything more than a tiny elite to actually live that way. This is creating tremendous stress in terms of rising middle class and even working class expectations and what is actually possible for India's limited geography to deliver. With the population still growing rapidly amongst the poor peasants, (particularly in the Hindi belt) - the consequences for the future are serious, if not catastrophic. Socio-economic consequences of a burgeoning population Even more serious than the physical consequences of expected scarcities are the potential social consequences. As is already quite evident worldwide, industrial growth can, and is taking place with virtually no increase in the demand for labor. Improved agricultural implements and expanded availiability of tractors and mechanical threshers and harvesters, has meant that there has also been little growth in the demand for agricultural labour. Since most of the population growth in India is taking place amongst those who will have the least skills when entering the job market - India is likely to be inundated with either completely illiterate or poorly schooled youth and children in a stagnant or pehaps even shrinking job market. The social consequences could be simply devastating and to some extent hints of this impending crisis are already visible in the slums of our metros. More and more children from the slums are being pushed into the job market as their parents find it impossible to feed their families. Village youth and young adults from poor and desperate villages migrate to the cities to compete with the existing pool of unskilled workers for a very limited supply of service-sector jobs. Wages are pushed down and in the long run could head to near-starvation levels even as per-capita city budgets for social spending are cut. Even when allocations for social spending are made, little of the money sanctioned is actually spent on the poor. As their numbers explode, the bargaining power of these desperately poor slum dwellers diminishes to the point where they cannot exercise any control on corrupt officials cheating them out of the few schemes the government runs in their name. This has been particularly true during the Orissa cyclone, and now during the famine that has afflicted much of the country. There have been almost daily reports of the needy being paid a fraction of the wages due to them under the food-for-work programs.

Corrupt officials are milking the poor out of every last rupee they possibly can. When people are desperate, they work for even less than what it takes to survive. And they have no energy to fight it out. But an army of poor and unemployed cannot be expected to tolerate their miseries for ever. In the absence of strong social organizations that represent the interests of the poor and help build a more humane and just society - their seething discontent could manifest itself in many unexpected and unpleasant ways. With the present disarray in India's left movement and the inability of the unions to organize the unorganized - it is not unlikely that India's urban slums could become centres of social anarchy. While some may take to petty or violent crime, others may let out their frustrations in sudden and volcanic explosions of social discontent. It may be quite difficult to predict as to which direction this frustration will take. Cheap labour - asset or liability? So far, large sections of India's elite, while viewing the poor and their "tendency to overreproduce" with disgust and contempt, have done little to push for a serious population policy. In large part this has been because they have benefited from this unending supply of cheap labour. But this unending supply of cheap and largely unskilled labour has serious unrecorded economic consequences. It severely constricts demand-growth and limits Indian industry to producing low quality, low-valued added goods. In the global market, this eventually puts Indian industry at a great competitive disadvantage rather than advantage. Modern-day production fetches larger profits when labour productivity is multiplied manifold. With some exceptions (like the Gulf oil industry), even in the extractive industries like mining, India's cheap labour cannot always compete against advanced mechanized procedures. Industries that rely excessively on human labour are generally becoming unrenumerative, and generate low rates of profit. Higher rates of profit are to be found in those industries where the labor force must be well-educated and highly well-trained. Those Indians who wish to sell India's cheap labour in the world market will find that the scope for selling commodities produced by cheap labour is ultimately quite limited. That will not turn India into the "Asian tiger" that they wish. On the contrary. It is important to abserve that years of high-growth in the ASEAN nations were also accompanied by rapidly falling birth rates, rapidly increasing literacy rates, and what is most significant - also rising wages. Virtually every ASEAN member has a literacy rate of over 85%, with much lower infant mortality rates and higher life-expectancy than India. Their work-force on the average is better trained, better paid, and more skilled than India's. Without investing in the social sector it is futile to dream about India becoming like an ASEAN "tiger". It is their highly skilled work-force - especially in nations like Korea and Taiwan that has helped these nations build advanced products that can compete with the best in the world.

India's industrialists ought to know that a poorly-trained and demoralized work-force cannot be compensated for by simply importing tools and machinery. Even to use modern machinery effectively and to keep it in working order requires certain skills that do not come automatically. Another dimension to the cheap work-force scenario is that the demand for labor-saving inputs and devices grows very slowly. This means that both in the industry and in the home, the switch to higher quality machines, and tools does not take place or takes place very slowly. If it is cheaper to hire labour than buy a labour-saving device - who will make the switch? But since human endeavour can rarely match the precision and accuracy of well-designed computer-controlled electronic machines - the quality of Indian goods remains uncompetitive in the world market, even as the internal market for capital goods and appliances stalls. A cheap labour market also implies a restricted market for consumption. When workers are well-paid they are able to buy more goods produced by industry. This leads to increased demand fuelling new investment and new opportunities for industries to expand. But if wages are so low that people can just about eat and spend on nothing else even the market for consumer goods stagnates or shrinks. This means that industry has to constantly contend with demand-recessions. If Indian industry is to ever grow at double-digit rates, the entire Indian mindset will have to change from tolerating a growing but cheap and unskilled workforce into building the social infrastructure that will rapidly control population growth and spend the money on improving the all-round quality of India's workforce. While it is imperative that India quickly address it's growing population, a problem that threatens to grow dangerously out of hand - it must do so without the prejudices and lackadaisical attitudes of the past. The problem should be taken up not just by the social welfare ministry but by all government and non-governmental agencies, as well as by progressive organizations and unions. However, rather than come out with undemocratic and discriminatory schemes like freezing the representation of the Hindi-belt states in parliament, schemes ought to be designed with compassion and sympathy for the poor. Issues such as gender inequality, social pressures concerning marriage and sexuality, social pressures for having more children, especially male children ought to be confronted. Pressures from religious orthodoxy ought to be challenged. Above all, the well-being of small families ought to be guranteed. So far, India's family planning programs have seen only limited success because the programs have not tackled the issue in a holistic way. There have been few concrete incentives for the poor to keep their families small. There has been little attention paid to enforcing a liveable minimum wage, so that children are not pushed into work early.

There has been little attention paid to guaranteeing jobs or decent schooling for those amongst the poor who do adopt family planning methods and restrict their birth rates. There has also been little attention to the need for old age pensions, for affordable healthcare and disability insurance so that the poor feel secure enough not to want to have more children as an "insurance" for the future. Of course, in practice, with the growth of capitalism - the values of the traditional family system have rapidly broken down. As a result, there is little solidarity amongst family members. Few family members chip in when a health emergency strikes or when a family member is seriously injured or disabled. The elderly are often abandoned by their children when they migrate far away from their ancestral villages. All the old reasons for having more children are disappearing. It is consequently imperative that concerned social agencies educate India's illiterate or poorly schooled about the dangers and negative consequences of having large families. India's population policy needs to be based on concrete measures that not only help solve our population problem but also helps the poor to improve their lives in tangible and meaningful ways. In this regard, our film industry and television industry also need to play a socially responsible role in creating the value-systems that not only rewards small families but also makes society collectively responsible for looking after the poor when they do adopt socially responsible measures. Blaming or ridiculing the poor and denying them their democratic rights will not be helpful in this regard. Neither will an escapist or careless attitude. Based on the past record of most state and national governments to delay constructive intervention until the nation becomes overawed by a full-blown crisis, there is a danger that a time may come when as the problem becomes more intense and perceived to be more and more intolerable, there may be a chorus of calls for more intrusive and coercive measures. Rather than wait for the crisis to grow out of hand, progressive organizations need to be especially pro-active. It is particularly important that India's progressive community see to it that the population issue is seriously and adequately addressed - and addressed in an ethical and socially constructive way. For too long, some in the Indian left have dismissed the problem of India's population growth as a problem for the "bourgeoisie" and not a "class" problem. They have not always tried to see the connection between child labour and large families, or the connection between large families and diminished bargaining power for the working class as a whole. It is high time that unions, progressive social organizations and working-class oriented parties and all other concerned organizations and citizens understand this problem in all it's depth and assist India's poor peasantry and young and growing urban proletariat to intervene in the population debate in a constructive and socially redeeming and socially conscious way.