The Hindu Business Line : Human deluge

DO you at all remember any statement or call by any of the leading lights of any of the political parties, or persons in authority in Central or State Governments, on the frightening catastrophe of population explosion towards which India is heading?

The last one heard on the subject was at the time of the release in 2000 of the report of the National Commission on Population headed by Dr M. S. Swaminathan.

At that time too, the report was dismissed with a few lines and sound bites in the print and electronic media, and there has been no sign of any kind of follow-up, other than, perhaps, the part-time appointment of Mr T. V. Antony as Adviser to the Government of India on Population Stabilisation.

This step is to be welcomed because Mr Antony is an eminently practical person who had taken up population control as his mission and in his various capacities in the Tamil Nadu Government, devised a number of ingenious ways to rouse public consciousness and bring down the birth rate.

But there is little a person in his position can do unless there is strong political backing and allocation of adequate funds for whatever needs to be done.

The fact that none of the budget speeches in recent years had highlighted the gravity of the looming problem shows it nowhere figures in the thought processes of the powers-that-be.

On the population front, only the Southern States of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have a consistent and creditable record of giving a sustained push to the efforts to reduce the crude birth rate to around 19, as against the all-India average of 26.

Because of the scant attention paid to this ticking time bomb by Hindi-speaking States of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, there is the distinct danger of the uncontrollable human deluge from there submerging the rest of India and setting at naught all prospects of balanced development and equitable access to employment opportunities.

Nothing short of a constant dinning and vigorous drive from the very top — the Prime Minister at the Centre and the Chief Ministers in the States — can bring about the massive mobilisation of all agencies, public, private, official and non-official to forestall the devastating tsunami of numbers that is indubitably round the corner.

B. S. Raghavan

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