It struck me at the Association of Corporate Advisers and Executives' award ceremony in Kolkata, pioneered by its president, Jinesh S Vanzara, that chief guest Sachin Pilot sounded like Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen ("It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place"). Or Lee Kuan Yew's insistence that Singaporeans must work harder to continue earning the same wages.
The corporate affairs minister stressed in an illuminating extempore speech that only 12 million new jobs annually can keep unemployment at the present level. There were 10 million jobless at last reckoning but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once told the US House of Representatives' Asia-Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, "Every time you saw a new moon, there were another million people [in India]."
The subcommittee's Chairman Stephen J Solarz and I once breakfasted together with Ah Meng, Singapore Zoo's poster girl orang-outang. India then accounted for 16 per cent of the world's population crammed into 2.42 per cent of its surface. The space remains unchanged, but we were soon 17 per cent.
Pilot's point about job creation boils down to the numbers game. Not the one M Karunanidhi has precipitated but the grim crisis that everyone pretends doesn't exist because Indira Gandhi had to pay for Sanjay's clumsy attempt to resolve the single biggest challenge India faces with nasbandi. Unless it is tackled, another Malthusian apocalypse (England's Black Death or Bengal's Great Famine) will push us towards extinction.
The plight of the quiet backwater my family moved into in 1946 indicates this looming nightmare. Our narrow road had 18 bungalows, 18 families and as many cars. Only three bungalows remain. The other 15 have erupted into high-rise blocks with about 100 families in each. Many have two or more cars. The widened road has swallowed up most of the pavement. Three schools (one holds classes in factory-like shifts), a repair garage, a marriage house, travel agent, two hookah bars, two popular takeaway joints, a barber, laundry, dhobi, grocer and one or two nondescript shops compound massive traffic jams. Every civic service is under intense pressure. Municipal sweepers charge extra to clear domestic refuse.
This typifies the awesome future I won't see, but young men like Pilot must do something about. Over half the population being under 25 gives India an edge over China, but also means higher reproduction and even more crowding. Pilot mentioned "shifting people from farmland to shop floors" and empowering them with "the necessary skills or education to work in industry". Both are laudable and needed. But where is the industrial capacity to absorb more workers?
As it is, a million Indians flood the labour market every month. New industry demands land. It must also avoid the hazards Pilot listed earlier - unscrupulous promoters, illegally collected deposits and what he called "ponzi" or money circulation schemes. Too many people churn too little economic activity. Regeneration is a high national priority but population control is still feared as voter-unfriendly.
China's one-child norm, which has reportedly aborted more foetuses than there are people in America, is ruled out. But Indians (especially non-resident Indians, today's twice-born social crème de la crème) abort enough female foetuses not to affect hypocritical horror at the idea. A mix of education, persuasion and compulsion packaged in marketing techniques is the only way.
Resistance is inevitable. It's a concomitant of growth. The seven million prosperous inhabitants of Shanghai's glittering Pudong suburb across the river didn't shift voluntarily. Neither did the 300 million Chinese who abandoned agriculture for industry in the last 20 years.
When Pilot says it's impossible here because democratic decision-making at every level of federal governance is so complex and time-consuming, he really means that votes are at stake. Do we want Nano in West Bengal or Trinamool in the United Progressive Alliance? Such choices make it absolutely essential to instruct people on the need to control numbers for their own survival.
That matters even more than Pilot's promise to facilitate corporate liquidation. The company whose winding up petition has been pending since 1947 in the Orissa High Court can afford to wait another 24 years for a record century. A hundred years is nothing for a culture whose yesterday is tomorrow. Both are kala, and time is maya. But the young leaders of the future - and Pilot seems one of the most briskly businesslike of them - cannot afford to forget that the demographic dividend will turn into demographic disaster if India continues to expand at the seams until they burst.
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