Capitalism, a contraceptive

Capitalism has translated into millions of women having fewer children than ever before, writes Binay Kumar.

All of us who grew up in India in the decades of the '70s and the '80s were brought up on the notion of India's uncontrolled population growth as being the main hindrance to its development and progress. But India was not alone in popularising such a thesis. Across the world, for over three decades now, economists and sociologists have argued that that the human species is reproducing itself too fast and this has serious implications for the limited resources that mother earth possesses to support its children.

Not surprisingly, the notion that population growth is reaching explosive proportions has gained currency even amongst the legislative and judicial establishments, reflecting the wider view that state intervention may not only be necessary but desirable to curb this trend. If there is one positive memory of the otherwise darkest chapter in the history of Indian democracy, notoriously referred to as Indira Gandhi's emergency, it is of forcing the whole issue of population control to the forefront of the political agenda.

Only yesterday I read of our Supreme Court in India upholding the disqualification of a municipality member because he was found to have violated a Haryana law imposing the two-child norm on members of local panchayats and municipalities. According to the learned judges, "The court has been at pains to point out how the growth of population of India was alarming and posed a menace to be checked".

The Supreme Court's latest pronouncements on population control are possibly rooted in polemic that was made famous by Dr Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University in his best selling book published in 1968, The Population Bomb. The central argument of his book was that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control".

"And while this is being done we must take action to reverse the deterioration of our environment before population pressure permanently ruins our planet. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer."

In the face of Dr Ulrich's conventional wisdom - if not rhetoric - lately I from a distance have been confronted with mounting evidence that we may have actually overplayed the population card. Yes, world population has risen quite rapidly in the post-war years, thanks to democratisation of political systems coupled with technological revolution which made available superior healthcare and exponential growth in food production.