Month: May 2004

{Continued from People Matter: India’s Population Problem.}

A big picture description of an economy would have to include at its minimum the resources within an area, the technology available, the population and how they are organized. The available resources are strictly limited in the short-run. For a given area and its resources, a factor called the carrying-capacity can be defined. This indicates the level of population which the area can sustain without resource depletion. Any population larger than the carrying-capacity would lead to unsustainable resource depletion. By this factor, any area which exceeds its carrying-capacity is considered overpopulated. It can be plausibly argued that India’s population exceeds India’s carrying-capacity. That is not to say that India is alone in this regard; even the US is vastly overpopulated by this criterion given its capacity and inclination to use global resources unsustainably. But my focus here is India.

Some of the effects of overpopulation should be briefly indicated. Intensive agriculture can impoverish the soil and the relentless conversion of forests and old growth to farmlands leads to soil erosion and desertification. India loses about 8,000 square miles of arable land each year. Fresh water reserves are used up faster than what nature can replace; groundwater levels fall. With the disappearance of forests, rainfall patterns change leading to droughts and floods. The biotic diversity decreases with the loss of animal habitat. Pollution of lakes, rivers and the atmosphere takes its toll in terms of health hazards.

At the social level, overcrowding leads to communal tensions and civil unrest. Malnutrition and poor health services create unnaturally high infant mortality rates. Education takes the back seat while the society is remorselessly driven to unemployment and underproductivity. The cycle of poverty finally gets a firm hold on the population at large and it is a vicious cycle from which it is almost impossible to break free. Though we may gloss over the details of the exact effects of all this, it can be reasonably argued that overpopulation is the corner stone upon which all the other ills of society are founded.

The scarcity of goods and the abundance of people are a potent formula for poverty. Poverty and exploitation are quite well suited. Let’s look at an analogy to see the connection and further explore its implications.

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Consider the hypothetical situation of two men who start out with equal resources at their disposal in terms of earning capacity and so forth. One of them, call him Blue, has two children whom he cares for with all his limited resources. The Blue children get reasonable education and become professionals. The other guy, call him Green, has six children. The Green children do not become professionals since they each had only one-third the resources as the Blue children. The Green children become labourers. The trend continues and soon Green has 36 grandchildren all of whom are not very well educated. The Blue grandchildren, numbering four now, continue on the footsteps of their parents since the parents were educated and more productive. The Blue children were able to have spare resources to educate their children and these became rich people who finally employ the Green grandchildren to work for them.

Now in this hypothetical situation, we need not ascribe any malice on the part of the Blue family nor any attempt on their part to exploit the Green family. All things being equal, the Green family just did not have any surplus to invest in the education and growth of their offsprings unlike the Blue family. The Green family just had to use all its steadily declining resources to feed its exponentially increasing population; they just did not have any left over money to improve their lot.

Let’s fast forward a few generations now. Given the rate of growth of populations — exponential — the Greens number in the thousands and the Blues are in hundreds. The Blues have steadily improved their lot since they keep getting richer doing more productive and creative work which is highly valued and the Greens work for the Blues in factories, houses, etc., at less productive (albeit necessary) positions.

What can be learned from this admittedly highly artificial scenario which we have developed? That humans are in one significant respect different from any other species on the planet. For any other species, numerical strength implies biological success and any strategy which leads to increased numbers is a winning strategy. Survival of the species depends upon successful breeding within the natural constraints of available resources. The name of the game is to proliferate as fast as possible to maintain quantity. Nature imposes quality control with ruthless efficiency. But for humans, the situation is different. Numbers alone do not ensure success since we have left that stage of evolution a few thousand years ago with the advent of technology and the need to effectively exploit the environment.

The concept of disposable resources comes into the game. Any resources which are not strictly required for the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, is available for purposes which are uniquely human. The surplus is available for education, scientific research, technological development and the pursuit of art and recreation. All of these activities ideally improve the quality of human life and also change the survival game in favor of those who have an excess at their disposal.

INDIA: BONDED LABOR

There exists, unfortunately, the notion of bonded labour. These are people who through circumstances are in perpetual debt and whose earning capacity is so low that they cannot ever hope to have any excess with which to repay their debts. Lacking any disposable resources at all, they continue to barely survive using all their earnings and don’t have any hope of ever breaking free of the cycle of poverty.

Consider, if you will, India. So we have a very large population of poorly educated people a large majority of which live at or below subsistence levels. All the available resources are used in trying to desperately survive and there is virtually no surplus. There is nothing left over for investing in those areas which are the most productive like education, social uplift and technological development. India has to buy from other nations some of the things that it needs and these tend to be costly because of a number of reasons.

Let us dispassionately look at the trade situation between India and say a developed country like the USA. They, USA, export to India products which are high cost, like weapons, software, airplanes, etc. These products are high in price and capital intensive. India, in return, exports to the USA products which are labour intensive, low cost and low value. So, we have the import of say a single airplane costing millions of dollars which a small number of people in the USA produced. In exchange for that airplane, we have to export the output of millions of Indians in say industries like stone, leather, carpets, etc., at a low price to the USA. The rate of exchange is naturally set by the forces of supply and demand. There are numerous sources from which USA can import all the labour intensive products that they need. But for India, the options are limited for high tech goods. To compete in the world market, therefore, a steady devaluation of Indian goods have to be maintained. The terms of trade continue on a trend adverse to the poor country and this is reflected in the steady devaluation of the local currency relative to the foreign currency.

The vicious cycle inexorably continues. The rich nations have the means to produce high value, high demand goods. They continue to have a surplus which they invest in technologies which are more productive and the gap increases. India has no surplus to invest in technological advancement and it continues in this race constantly falling behind. Any advantage gained is quickly dissipated in maintaining a burgeoning population through the import of essential goods like fuel and other scare commodities.

In effect, India is like a nation of bonded labourers with no recourse. The exploitation of this nation is inevitable given the circumstances however unfair it may appear to be. It is unfair that 20 percent of the world’s population consumes 80 percent of the world’s resources. It is unfair that India with 16 percent of the global population uses only 3 percent of its resources. But who is responsible for this imbalance and who are we going to complain to? Unfortunately, we have no one to thank but ourselves for the situation that we find ourselves in. Finally, what are we going to do about it?

Time to take a look once again at the population-poverty trap.

In 1965, about 40 years ago, there were less than 500 million of us. By 2004, the population of India has more than doubled. The effect of this incredible increase has been a falling standard of living in general, shortages, untold misery and conflict. It is foolish to expect that we can provide a decent standard of living to so many in such a short time. The vast majority of us do not have adequate drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and job opportunities. The preceding statement does not even begin to indicate the amount of human misery and sorrow which it implies. It hides within it the teeming millions who suffer without the slightest hope of ever seeing a future remotely human.

But let us get back to numbers again so that we can have at least an intellectual understanding of the problem before we begin to address the real issues. The population growth rate is a convenient measure of how fast the population is increasing. For India, it is at present 2.2 percent annually. This apparently innocuous looking number has terrible consequences. It implies that the population will double in less than 30 years. By the year 2030, at the current birth rate, India would have 1700 million people, surpassing China to become the most populous nation on earth. For the present, India has an additional 16 million mouths to feed, clothe and educate every year. Even the most optimistic scenario for the future of India is daunting due to demographic momentum. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University: “Suppose, over the next thirty to thirty-five years, India’s average completed family size dropped from the 1990 level of about 4.3 to 2.4 (replacement level) and remained there, and death rates didn’t rise. India’s population would continue to grow for almost a century, and when it stopped there would be about 2 billion Indians – as many people living in that one nation as populated the entire planet in 1930!”

A HUMAN PROBLEM

The numbers above are dry statistics and we are understandably dismissive of them since they have little relevance to more pressing problems at hand. So what’s the big deal? Well, it is a human problem and we have to feel the human issues involved to really understand what the implications are. An account of a personal encounter would be in place here. I walked out of a railway station while waiting in transit not long ago. It was noon time and the road in front of the station was crowded with the mad hustle of cars, buses, cycles, scooters and people. In the middle of the road, over a narrow divider, was the sleeping form of an old woman. She lay there in her rags with her eyes closed, perhaps asleep out of sheer exhaustion, with a stick and a battered tin can near at hand, in the middle of all the noise and fumes of the traffic in the noonday heat.

So here was a human being with all the capacity for love, pain, joy, hope, caring, companionship, contemplation and all those qualities that you and I have in common with every human. Nature had invested as much in her as in any other human on earth. Yet she was just a hopeless bundle of misery existing in a void without comfort or joy. I watched with a sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t do anything for her. And for the millions of others in circumstances not too different from her’s. It wasn’t the first time that I had seen something like this. It wasn’t even the first time that day. I am sure that you too have felt the pain. But we have stood by helplessly and turned away finally to cope with other problems.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being
something helpless that wants help from us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We may have unlimited compassion in our hearts but there is a limit to the sizes of our pockets. We have to shut out the dictates of our hearts to turn our attention to the urgent task of surviving. At best we dig out a few coins and hope to alleviate our conscience. The problem remains out of mind even though it is not out of sight. It is a human problem.

At another level of comprehension, it is an economic problem. The value of an entity is ruthlessly dictated by the ratio of supply and demand. We have too many people and hence each individual is valued so little. Pathetic though it is, the fact is that we have devalued human life to the point that millions continue to exist in conditions that afford little dignity and humanity and we are apparently unmoved to do anything about it.

What does this personal account have to do with the larger issue that I was discussing above? Pretty much everything, really, if you care to think about it. When I hear, for example, that so many millions of people live in dire poverty, I don’t really understand what it means. To fully understand it I would have to have the empathy to feel how it is like to be in that old woman’s place. Then to take that painful existence and multiply it a million fold (an impossible task, surely) and then I may have a hint of how much suffering is implied by that statement.

Well, you may say, all this thing about compassion and human pain is a lot of sentimental hogwash and doesn’t really concern you overly. But what if all this has an impact on you, your future and your children? Would you be concerned then? More about this later.