Struggling against statistics

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Two new woman chief ministers should mean a new look at numbers. As the United Nations Population Fund confirms, India is splitting at the seams because of its high fertility rate which can be traced to the female plight.

I am reminded of a nightmare ride to Tiger Hill. My Australian friend had driven out to Ayers Rock, camped there and got up early to see a pink glow slowly smear the tranquil wilderness.

I had got up in Darjeeling's cold dark to see the sun rise over Everest and found the road to Tiger Hill solid with stationary honking jeeps packed with cacophonous humanity.

It used to be said that India added an Australia every year to its population. No one uses that simile nowadays, possibly because our annual increase exceeds Australia's population. Nor has one heard much about family planning since Sanjay Gandhi's rough and ready methods brought down his mother's rule. Later governments shied away from incurring public wrath.

But the UNFPA's latest figures warn that numbers must be controlled, and not just to make Tiger Hill less unpleasant. India will squander the fruits of its technological revolution unless it reduces the birth rate.

This is one sphere in which we don't need to surpass China; yet, it is probably the only one in which we shall in the foreseeable future. The world's largest democracy is doomed to be the world's most populous nation.

The problem is not of food though the boast of self-sufficiency sounds hollow when accompanied by the qualifier that not everyone can afford to buy the wheat or rice we grow in abundance. The stark problem is space.

My wanderings once took me to an abandoned fort near Hyderabad. Surrounded by jungle, the ramparts enclosimg an empty space had niches at regular intervals, in each a stone statue. A grazing cow provided the only movement. Back in the vicinity some years later, I found the jungle gone, huts crowding the empty space, and not a single statue.

Wherever there is a vacant spot of land, there are people to grab it. Internal migration attracts attention only when it is cross-border and, therefore, offends local chauvinism, like Tamils in Maharashtra. Migration within linguistic states is not politically combustible in the short term but presents as grave a demographic and environmental challenge. A crisis is waiting to happen.

The more obvious problems caused by movement from village to city do not need reiteration. Basic facilities like housing and transport are grossly inadequate and insanitary overcrowding encourages disease and crime.

For a long time, union governments succeeded in preserving some kind of order in Delhi. It was the last cantonment, resisting the native hordes.

Now, Delhi has succumbed to India. It is the future Calcutta, the nightmare result of overflowing numbers, inadequate resources, weak planning and subordination of all pragmatic considerations to political expediency. Population is the root of all evil.

It is argued nowadays that national strength lies in manpower. Economists quote statistics from the thirties and forties to argue that people are better off. Malthus is scoffed at. But if malaria and smallpox no longer threaten life, the terror of HIV/AIDS lurks round the corner.

And while engineers and other educated young Indians look on the world as their oyster, their exodus deprives India of the expensively honed tools of future growth. Even our earnings as the world's back office, on which this column dwelt recently, are in truth a tribute to depressed wages.

Call centres are the prize for the moderately developed who are still poor but fluent in English. An accountant earns $60,000 in the US, $6,000 here and $3,600 in the Philippines. Sooner or later, the Filipinos will try to seize our lead.

Enforced birth control, like China's one-child norm, would go against the Bharatiya Janata Party's grain. But no responsible government can condone a 960:1,000 male:female ratio which reeks of gender discrimination, female foeticide and selective infanticide.

The UNFPA hopes to persuade China to switch to a client-oriented approach that stresses the quality of care and gives women the final choice on motherhood.

This may yield results in a society where Communist rigorousness has already reduced numbers and fertility and established a family role model.

It will be far less effective in a land where the state does not traditionally impinge on individual actions that are shaped by Hindu thinking with its emphasis on family and male heirs, a preference that economic conditions, especially in villages, still encourage.

The stated objective of bringing down the fertility rate to 2.1 by 2010 would certainly have an impact. The UNFPA calculates that while a 1.85 fertility rate would mean a global population of 2.3 billion, raising it to 2.35 would increase numbers to 36.4 billion. But how does India intend to attain the lower rate in another six years? Full female emancipation is the answer.

That means equal treatment within the family, proper education, earning capacity and individual choice. The prescription does not allow of any short cuts. Nor can it be achieved by tokens at the top.

One Vasundhara Raje is of as little relevance in this context as one Indira Gandhi was, but Rajasthan's first woman chief minister can, at least, demonstrate intent by exorcising her tradition-bound state of the evil of sati worship.