DEMOGRAPHY

India's billion

With the birth of the billionth Indian, as estimated by the U.N's Population Division, one in every six people in the world is an Indian.

LAXMI MURTHY

THE billionth Indian has been born. According to estimates released by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, this event took place on August 15. The announcement was received with considerable sur prise, since Indian estimates had placed the event as far away as May 2000. Officials at the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare insist that India is still short of the billion mark by about 12 million. The exact date is yet to be fixed by the te chnical committee on Population Projection.

The announcement by the U.N. Population Division took even other U.N. agencies by surprise. The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), which has been gearing for its Day of Six Billion, was somewhat deflated when the "Day of the Billionth Indian" stole some of th e momentum of the build-up to the campaign.

According to UNFPA estimates, the world population will reach the six-billion mark on October 12 - only 12 years after the five-billion mark. From 1804, when the world passed the one-billion mark, it took 123 years to reach the two-billion mark in 1927; 33 years to reach three-billion mark in 1960; 14 years to reach the four-billion mark in 1974. The landmark of five billion was crossed 13 years later, on July 11, 1987, a day which the governing council of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) suggested retrospectively in 1989 should be observed annually as World Population Day. The intent behind this observance was to "focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues, their impact on development and the environment, and on the need to find solutions to these concerns." The theme for the 1999 World Population Day, "Count up to the Day of Six Billion", was intended to drive home the message that although world population growth has slowed, population is still growing - addin g 78 million people every year.

Of the total increase in world population, 60 per cent is contributed by just 10 countries. India tops the list - contributing 21 per cent, with China second at 15 per cent. With India reaching the one-billion mark, one in every six people in the world i s an Indian. Yet it is clear that the population growth rate the world over is slowing. The growth rate of 1.33 per cent a year between 1995 and 2000 is significantly less than the peak growth rate of 2.04 per cent between 1965 and 1970. In the developin g countries, family size has reduced by half in the last three decades.

On October 28, 1998, the UNFPA moved the Day of Six Billion from June 16 to October 12, 1999. Dr. Nafis Sadiq, Executive Director, UNFPA, said: "This is very encouraging news." Yet a closer look reveals that there are distressing reasons underlying the a pparent population slowdown. The UNFPA itself admits that this is, according to the revised estimates, partly a result of the HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) pandemic. For instance, in Botswana, one of the coun tries hardest hit, one adult in four is infected with HIV.

IN any case, how relevant is the precise date of crossing either the billion mark or the six-billion mark? In a vast country like India, exact projections are near impossible and estimates may be way off the mark. While fixing exact dates on these events may be of mere statistical interest, they do serve to whip up a collective frenzy about the population "explosion". It is brought home to us that every sixth person in the world will be an Indian. Cause for celebration? Or alarm? The latter, if the inte rnational media are anything to go by.

A case in point would be a "news brief" of the Worldwatch Institute by Lester Brown and Brian Halweil, authors of Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge, a neo-Malthusian analysis centred on "over"-population as the major causative factor of food scarcity and environmental degradation. The authors outline a gloomy picture for India: "Well before hitting the one billion mark, the demands of India's population were outrunning its natural resource base. This can be seen in i ts shrinking forests, deteriorating rangelands, and falling water tables." They quote the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) which estimates that aquifer depletion could reduce India's grain harvest by one-fourth. The gloomy prognosis contin ues with a dire warning of political anarchy: "Falling water tables will likely lead to rising grain prices on a scale that could destabilise not only grain markets, but possibly the government itself." And in conclusion, the authors intone: "The princip al threat now may not be military aggression from without but population growth from within."

The presentation of population growth as a security threat stems from a supposed causal relationship between population pressures and resource scarcities. The main proponent of the scarcity-conflict model, Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon, suggests that environmentally induced internal conflict in turn causes states to fragment or become more authoritarian, seriously disrupting international security. The scarcity-conflict model today largely informs foreign policy, besides population and environmental policies. This perspective ignores the other, more important, contributory factors of environmental degradation - colonial forest policies which laid the ground for the ravaging of forests by contractors and the government, inequitable con sumption patterns, and polluting technology. Moreover, it ignores the organic relationship with nature shared by many indigenous and rural communities. Human beings are not merely rapacious consumers of the earth's resources, in some social paradigms the y also protect and nurture the earth. The unsustainable depletion of natural resources is more characteristic of an urban, industrial society. Rural Indian women have spearheaded ecological movements, questioned the dominant development paradigm, and cam paigned for a more sustainable model.

P.V. SIVAKUMAR
Of the total increase in world population,
60 per cent is contributed by just 10 countries.
India tops the list, contributing 21 per cent.

In India, the consumption by the highest income group (1.44 per cent of the population), of electricity, petroleum products and machine-based household appliances - products that have global environmental impact - is about 75 per cent of the total. For i nstance, the land diverted from food crop production to floriculture not only adversely impacts on nutritional levels, but degrades the environment with high pesticide and fertilizer use.

The consumption pattern of the elite in any Third World country is comparable to the relationship between that country and the "developed" world. In Latin America, for instance, vast tracts of valuable rainforest were cleared for cattle ranching. Owing t o favourable tariff treatment, most of the beef in Latin America is exported to the United States, much of it for use in fast-food chains or for pet food. The average Central American eats less beef than the average house-cat in the U.S. Every North Amer ican child consumes as much energy as three Japanese, six Mexicans, 12 Chinese, 33 Indians, 147 Bangladeshis, 281 Tanzanians or 422 Ethiopians.

I = PAT, an algebraic equation put forth in the 1970s by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, measures the impact of humans on the environment (I) as the product of the number of people (P), affluence/the amount of goods consumed per person (A), and the pollut ion generated by technology per good consumed (T). This analysis fails to account for various complexities such as who among the monolithic P is responsible for what, and the how and why behind pollution. While the global population reaches the six-billi on mark, it is worthwhile to remember that just under 25 per cent of the world's population consumes about 75 per cent of the world's resources and energy, and the same fraction generates most of the world's waste and global atmospheric pollution. The Pe ntagon, for instance, is the largest single consumer of energy in the U.S. and generates a tonne of toxic waste every minute. It is the "luxury" emissions of the rich that generate almost 90 per cent of the ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and two-thirds of carbon dioxide emissions, rather than the "survival" emissions of the poor. However, the "consumption explosion", with its disastrous implications, appears to engender less fear in the public consciousness than the "population explosion".

Yet the belief that all people use resources and create waste, and large families use more resources and create more waste, gained currency among most international development agencies which put population high on their agendas for problem-solving. The 'T' component of the debate - the highest-polluting industrial processes that provide consumer goods for the wealthiest fifth of humanity - are controlled almost entirely by men in the most powerful transnational corporations and governments, which manuf acture chemicals and weapons of mass destruction, with the main goal of maximising economic growth and profit. Yet policies of "population control" are targeted at the "poorest of the poor" - institutionally powerless women whose main goal is survival an d have larger numbers of children for complex reasons that range from immediate survival and necessity to high infant mortality, lack of access to health services and patriarchal control over reproduction.

India has one of the longest-running population programmes in the world, and Indian women, especially those from the poorer sections, have been subject to a population reduction programme garbed in euphemisms ranging from "family planning" to "family wel fare" and now "reproductive health". Sterilisation accounts for 71 per cent of contraception practice in India and the procedure is usually performed after achieving a family size of three or four children. Although it is an effective option of birth con trol for the individual woman, it does not have a significant demographic impact. To reduce birth rates dramatically, spacing methods have to gain primacy. From a policy-maker's perspective, long-acting hormonal contraceptives such as injectables (Net En and Depo Provera) and implants such as Norplant are "ideal" because they are provider-controlled. Women need not be relied upon to remember taking the pill, or to keep intrauterine devices in place, and men need not be persuaded to use condoms. The shif t to long-acting, hazardous contraceptives is justified on the plea that birth rates have to be brought down in a hurry - the price that women pay with their health is irrelevant.

The much-touted "paradigm shift" in population policy following the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994 pressured governments to depart from "demographic imperative" language and accommodate women's perspectives . Yet real changes have yet to take place. The panic about population explosions tends to overtake concerns of empowering women and enlarging the coverage of primary health care. The Delhi Population Bill, which was recently introduced in the Delhi Assem bly, contains harsh disincentives for those who have more than two children.

For many decades it has been known that birth rates are affected by a variety of parameters - the means of production, that is, whether the economy is in subsistence or industrialised mode; women's status and education; family structures; women's partici pation in the labour force, and so on. Though Indian representatives at the first World Congress on Population in Bucharest in 1975 popularised the slogan "Development is the best contraceptive", official policy has concentrated almost exclusively on the provision of contraceptives. The technological "solution" of developing more effective contraceptives is a politically safer option than genuine changes which impact on birth rates - land reform, expansion of social services and a just distribution of r esources. It is this paradigm which has to shift for birth rates to fall and equitable development to take place.

Laxmi Murthy is an activist and researcher in population and gender issues. She is associated with the non-governmental organisation, Saheli.