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India's Population Reaches 1 Billion |
| By Lester R. Brown and Brian Halweil
Worldwatch Institute
Sometime on Sunday, August 15, India's population passed the one billion mark, making it the second member of the exclusive one billion club, along with China. But reaching one billion is not a cause for celebration in a country where one half of the adults are illiterate, more than half of all children are undernourished, and one third of the people live below the poverty line.
Each year India is adding 18 million people, roughly another Australia. By 2050, U.N. demographers project that it will have added another 530 million people for a total of more than 1.5 billion. If India continues on the demographic path as projected, it will overtake China by 2045, becoming the world's most populous country. Well before hitting the one billion mark, the demands of India's population were outrunning its natural resource base. This can be seen in its shrinking forests, deteriorating rangelands, and falling water tables. For Americans to understand the pressure of population on resources in India, it would be necessary to squeeze the entire U.S. population east of the Mississippi River and then multiply it by four. Although India has tripled its grain harvest over the last half century, food production has barely kept up with population. Riceland productivity has doubled while that of wheat has more than tripled. Earlier maturing, high-yield wheats and rices, combined with a tripling of irrigated area, have enabled farmers to double crop winter wheat and summer rice in the north and to double crop rice in the south.
Falling water tables are now also threatening India's food production. The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) estimates that withdrawals of underground water are double the rate of aquifer recharge. As a result, water tables are falling almost everywhere. If pumping of water is double the recharge of an aquifer, then eventual depletion of the aquifer will reduce water pumped by half. In a country where irrigated land accounts for 55 percent of the grain harvest and where the lion's share of irrigation water comes from underground, falling water tables are generating concern. The IWMI estimates that aquifer depletion could reduce India 's grain harvest by one fourth. Falling water tables will likely lead to rising grain prices on a scale that could destabilize not only grain markets, but possibly the government itself. With 53 percent of all children already undernourished and underweight, any drop in food supply can quickly become life threatening. With a staggering 338 million children under 15 years of age, India is also facing a major challenge on the educational front. Despite efforts to educate its people during the 52 years since it achieved independence in 1947, some 54 percent of adults in t he world's largest democracy cannot read or write. Failure to provide adequate education has undermined efforts to slow population growth since female access to education is a key to smaller families. Providing enough jobs for the 10 million new entrants into the job market each year is even more difficult. Nowhere is this more evident than in agriculture where the number of farms increased from 48 million in 1960 to 105 million in 1990. Meanwhile, the average farm shrank from 2.7 hectares to less than 1.6 hectares, a reduction of some 42 percent. By 2020, the land will pass to another generation-and another round of fragmentation will occur, shrinking farm size even more, threatening the ability of those living on the land to earn a livelihood, and triggering a potential migration from the land that could inundate India's cities. After several decades of rapid population growth, the government of India, overwhelmed by sheer numbers, is suffering from demographic fatigue. After trying to educate all the children coming of school age, trying to find jobs for all the young people com ing into the job market, and trying to deal with the environmental fallout of rapid population growth, such as deforestation and soil erosion, India's leaders are worn down and its fiscal resources spread thin. As a result, when a new threat emerges, such as aquifer depletion, the government is not able to respond effectively. If this decrease in water supplies causes food production to drop, death rates may start to rise. As noted earlier, India's population is projected to reach 1.5 billion by 2050, but there are doubts as to whether the natural resource base will support such growth. These projections will not materialize either because India accelerates the shift to smaller families, alleviating the projected additional stress on the resource base by reducing births, or because it fails to do so and the combination of deteriorating conditions pushes up death rates. The prospect of rising death rates as a result of aquifer depletion is no longer as hypothetical as it once seemed. Death rates are already rising in Africa, where governments, also overwhelmed by several decades of rapid population growth, have been unable to respond effectively to the HIV epidemic. As a result, adult infection rates already exceed 20 percent in several countries, including Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. In the absence of a medical breakthrough, these countries will likely lose on e fifth of their adult population within the next decade. In Zimbabwe, a model of development in Africa until a few years ago, life expectancy has fallen from 60 years in 1990 to 44 years at present and is expected to drop to 39 years by 2010. In some ways, India today is paying the price for its earlier indiscretions when, despite its impoverished state, it invested in a costly effort to design and produce nuclear weapons and succeeded in becoming a member of the nuclear club. As a result, it now has a nuclear arsenal capable of protecting the largest concentration of impoverished citizens on earth. Even today, India spends 2.5 percent of its GNP for military purposes but only 0.7 percent on health, which includes family planning. Unless India can quickly reorder priorities, it risks falling into a demographic dark hole, one where population will beg in to slow because death rates are rising. It may be time for India to redefine security. The principal threat now may not be military aggression from without but population growth from within. |
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