Comments on: Journey to Kanpur — Part 2

By: surojit

surojit — Tue, 02 May 2006 04:57:12 +0000

I’m always amazed at so many people trying to reduce population. Population density and GDP to population ratio should be more important metric. Our population density is still lower than Japan. Even non-industrialized Japan has higher population density than India. (So it’s not true that they first industrialized and then started to procreate.)
Instead of reducing population we should focus on increasing income. Let’s work on the numerator, shall we?

By: shiva

shiva — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:00:41 +0000

With 70% of our fellow citizens subsisting on agriculture at little better than starvation wages allowing good money into the sector makes sense. There is a lot of dead investment by way of benami land holdings in large parts of India representing bad money; that earns the government no taxes, provides meagre wages and perpetuates a host of social and economic evils. The good money could come in many ways, corporate money (which is well regulated through financial market and labour legislation and oversight); cooperative money (as with the dairy sector) and the sugar sector (if you ignore the disastrous pricing of water and electricity). The temptation to run things from New Delhi must be avoided and curbed and experiments at every level must be encouraged.

By: Raghuveer

Raghuveer — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:03:30 +0000

Atanu,

Say, there are 1000 villages with 1000 people in each. How does it become a city/town? It would be insightful if you can give more details/practical steps to be taken to realize your vision and discuss the implications.

This is not a rhetorical question, am really curious to know.

By: little Ram

little Ram — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:20:45 +0000

Going back in time, one can see that the history of Indian civilisation has cetered around city-states that ensured prosperity of its dwellers who were formerly left unprotected, with poor access to various facilites in their ‘rural’ setting. This is probably true of any other nation as well. Hence this would point to development of rural hubs or nodes that would actually develop into mini-townships or cities as Atanu says.

My only point of concern is whether 600 cities is the right number. I have been more inclined to a figure clsoer to 6000 of these hubs with a population of 100,000 each on an average. Feedback?

By: Patel

Patel — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:37:43 +0000

Soumen,

I think urbanization and development which Atanu pointed out are the best ways to reduce population.

Policies designed to control growth rates will create welfare problems in the future. This is something China may one day have to deal with.

By: Soumen Chakrabarti

Soumen Chakrabarti — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:12:49 +0000

For the foreseeable future, moving the villager away from subsistence farming can be achieved only by removing subsistence from the villager! There is good reason the average American farmer produces food for 50 mouths and the Indian counterpart barely manages 2–3. Per-capita energy is the final arbiter of how we live. I cannot see India’s per-capita energy consumption increasing by even a factor of 3x ever, which will still be far lower than EU and US numbers. Even China is significantly ahead, although I don’t know how much of that energy leaves China via exports. I don’t believe there is any plausible route other than very quick reduction in population.

By: Jyoti Iyer

Jyoti Iyer — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:32:55 +0000

“Continue?”

Yes please!!

By: Abhijat

Abhijat — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:43:41 +0000

Dear Atanu,

I am ignorant of the economic history of our country. All I wonder is: are there any lessons for the present from the past ? I feel that there may be some lessons there as I cannot imagine affluence without some sensible political and economic structures. Perhaps not all of the lessons would be applicable to the present context. To what extent do RISC, PURA etc. adapt and use these lessons, if at all ?

By: Malapati Raja Sekhar

Malapati Raja Sekhar — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:20:20 +0000

Short and crispy explanation of your paper while comparing PURA. Why didn’t you link to “Risk paper”?

Raja
http://malapati.blogspot.com/

By: gaurav

gaurav — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:04:58 +0000

Atanu,
Warning:My uninformed opinion follows

Your plans seems to make sense.
Have you dealt with agriculture?
I am not an expert, but is land distribution the way to go.
Land distribution (and most probably non senscial restriction on usage and sale of agricultural land)inevitably results in small land holdings.
It is a double whammy, the farming is almost always subsistence based.
This means that marginal farmers remains condemned to poverty and the output is low compared to international standards.
The way out of it should mechanized farming, which may be possible if corporate sector is allowe by realxing land acquisition.
The only thing I am not sure is whether from perspective of energy scarcity this is feasible.

Apologies for being offtopic, but I had to get this off.

Regards