A couple of years ago, when I was still in Tehatta and still travelling back from Krishnagar to Kolkata on the Krishnagar Local, exhaustion provided a rare insight into the condition of humanity. Specifically the number of humans we have around in the world today. As I sat on the “fourth” seat (and basically had a buttock and a half hanging off the edge), what struck me was not my discomfort but the expressions of the people around me. Some were more uncomfortable than I was – being wedged between seats waiting for one or another passenger to get up and leave. Others were jostling with vendors in the narrow aisles that separated the two sides of the train seats. The scenario in the clear area between doors was a different order of hell altogether.
But some were comfortable, having boarded the train on its way up instead of from the first station (Krishnagar) on the way down. These people, and other enterprising individuals who climbed up from the space between the train tracks because they could avoid the rush on the platform, occupied the much-coveted window seats in the direction the train was moving. Yet all of them – bar the children perhaps – had a look of exhaustion and a forlorn desire to return home.
No doubt some of this exhaustion came from the work they did. But you could tell from their sweaty bodies and their tired eyes that a good amount of it had to do with the daily trials of heckling and being heckled, jostling and being jostled, elbow-butting and being elbow-butted, in the trains and buses that made up the routes from their homes to their workplaces. They were victims of each other, and none could find a solution to the problem. Or they would have found it a long time back – and implemented it for themselves and their children, relatives, friends and near and dear ones. Which would have promptly led to overcrowding and a return to the previous state of affairs.
The problem, essentially, was that they were humans and wanted to propagate the human species, this being their primary primordial purpose in life. Every species tries to do so, and bar the pandas, never tires of doing it when the time is right. In case of humans, the time is always right, and having a child – a male child specifically – is always good news.
Naturally, we, and our parents and grandparents before us, have grown up with an overabundance of people all around us. And with them, advice on how to limit the population so we don’t end up with a ticking time bomb. The more enthusiastic ones – and I count the politicians in this class – claimed that this would also give us a “demographic dividend” i.e. a young population unburdened by too many old or young would focus on working more, earning more, saving more and investing more to spur growth of the country.
In recent years, all of this has taken a specific shape – that of a comparison with China’s population graph. Critics of the Indian experience say that China’s draconian one-child policy was responsible for their rapid strides, and India should have followed a similar approach, even when it advocated a more moderate two-child policy. Hence, while the Sanjay Gandhian sterilization drives of the Emergency period are decried, more “persuasive” measures such as barring families with too many children from benefits and government jobs (Looking at you Assam), are often supported. Whatever the means, the goal is agreed upon – reduce population growth at any cost.
We and our parents before us have grown up with this mindset. So firmly is it ingrained in our psyche that we blame everything for overcrowding – poor government spending on infrastructure, poor management, etc. – but don’t bother to tackle the fundamental question. It is a given that the government will ask the people to reduce the number of children they have, and that they will do so, but too slowly and too erratically for that to be of any immediate relief to anyone.
The government clearly, still believes in harping on this mantra. Our dear Modiji spoke of the population problem and asked people to limit the number of children people have. Yet surprisingly, the government’s own surveys have reported that the Indian population may stabilize faster than anticipated – by around 2050 – and the process may have already begun. An important sign of this was that the number of children being enrolled in the primary classes had already peaked or would peak by 2021. For a country obsessed with having less children, the inflexion point in the growth curve of primary enrolments should have been greeted with a drumroll. In effect, it was all but ignored by all except those working on population and education policy.
But the stagnation in primary enrolment is only the tip of the iceberg. All over the world, populations are stabilizing faster than had been anticipated at the turn of the century. Not just developed countries like Singapore (0.92 births/per female), South Korea (1.12 births/female) and Japan (1.43 births/female), even developing countries like Thailand (1.44 births/female) are facing the prospect of a stabilizing population. China, the panda in the room, has a fertility rate of 1.8 per female. Even this is disputed by some demographers as spurious since China’s own Department of Statistics found the actual figure around 1.2. Given the size of China’s population, a difference of 0.6 would be huge. Even if the truth is somewhere between the two figures, what is clear is that China will stabilize faster than anticipated.
The funny thing is, none of this is bringing any cheer to any of these countries. Countries like Thailand, which gave the world Mr. Condom in the 1970s, are far from enthused by the prospect of population growth coming to a halt, and even a decline setting in. The reasons are not far to seek. Firstly, a population that ceases to grow means that the demographic dividend phase is definitely over. The number of old people on assisted living, with pensions and state benefits, is increasing and the number of working age people who can support them – not just personally as sons and daughters but as taxpayers funding the welfare state – is decreasing. At the same time, the number of youth entering the job market is also declining, which means less young people supporting more old people. This puts greater strains on the incomes of the working age population, which in turn means less investment and lowered standard of living. All of this does not bode well for the development of a country still counted as upper middle income by the World Bank and developing by the UN and other major bodies.
Another problem is related to sex ratio i.e. the number of women per 1000 men. In many countries currently witnessing a rapid decline in fertility rate, such as China, Thailand, Vietnam and even India, there is a strong preference for sons. China’s one child policy produced far more sons than daughters and has left millions of men with no prospect of finding a match. These “left behind” men are not good news for society, mainly because their pent-up social and sexual angst is likely to express itself in anti-social and anti-women behavior, which itself is normalized in the patriarchal societies of South and East Asia.
Thirdly, there is the problem of infrastructure. Capitalism presumes a basic expansion of the economy. When it doesn’t – as it cyclically does – recession or depression set in. But this phase is temporary because sooner or later, economic conditions and stimuli ensure that expansion continues. In the meantime, population has grown too. This means more investment in trains, buses, subways, highways, ports, etc. etc. All of this provides a major engine of growth to the economy, which in turn brings in investment and creates jobs for the youth. If population stops growing, there are less youth to take up the jobs but more importantly, such expansion of infrastructure is not fundamentally required. Sure, maintenance of ageing infrastructure would require some amount of investment and jobs. But as the US shows, maintenance can be spotty and expansion is not guaranteed even with moderate population expansion. You could argue that the developing countries would reach the US level of infrastructure at a much later date and hence may keep investing in infrastructure with imported labour for the existing citizens. But this begs the question – most of the investment is done by the state, and if the state is unable to generate more and more revenue through taxation because economic activity is slowing as a result of a lower workforce, where would the money come from ?
The effects of this are visible starkly in many parts of the world, but most starkly in the former Soviet puppets of Eastern Europe and in China. Following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, people fled the economic hardships of these countries to seek a better life in Western Europe or in the Americas. Population growth was severely impacted and in many countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, the effects have ensured that these countries will never again reach the pre-1990 levels of fecundity. Here, Soviet era apartment blocks, factories and other infrastructure gradually rust in neglect, no one willing to live there.
In China, expectations of population growth and continuing economic growth fueled a building boom funded heavily by debt. Many of them now sit empty and lifeless. Buyers don’t exist, and in many cases, the governments have had to cut back on supply of auxiliary services to these building complexes as the economic outlook worsens on the back of demographic stagnation and a trade war with the US.
If these stories are new, in South Korea and Japan, they are pretty old. Japan has many train stations which have only one train running – often empty – in the day. These used to be bustling suburbs but now are home to elderly people, with caregivers and tourists being the major travelers to and from these areas. In South Korea, schools lie empty as villages no longer have children to send to them. The children that are born are sent to better staffed and better served schools. Many of these schools have been closed down.
I know what you are thinking – how is all of this possible in India ? Here, the endless refrain is that schools be expanded and education be brought to the doorsteps of disadvantaged and often poorly literate sections. It is rather jarring then to read a government report recommending “consolidation” of government schools in order to accommodate the reality of a stagnating primary enrolment and the very real fact that many rural schools sit empty despite having teachers and infrastructure.
Yet in a country as large as India, nothing can be generalized so easily. There are regions like Bihar, UP, MP, Rajasthan and Haryana, which have been witnessing still high rates of birth. Bihar leads the country with a fertility rate of 3.3, which is on par only with some of the more backward Central Asian, West Asian and African countries. Virtually the whole of the Americas, Europe and East Asia is better off.
But look beyond BIMARU, and the picture looks rather different. Sikkim has the lowest fertility rate in the country at around 1.2. West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab also stand in this low category with a range of 1.6 to 2, all of which are below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per female. In other words, while these states have fertility rates approaching or surpassing European and East Asian states, BIMARU and adjoining states have fertility rates approaching the poorest parts of the world. This imbalance has serious implications.
Firstly, there is a direct correlation between the development level of a state and its fertility rate. It is not surprising that states like Sikkim and Kerala have some of the best development metrics such as child care, literacy level, maternity services, etc. while Bihar is the absolute worst. What this means is that as the years roll by, the more educated and more prosperous people from the advanced provinces will decline in number while those from the less developed and more populous provinces will increase. In a homogenous country, such a transition may have occurred with little social impact. However, India being rich in diversity and even richer in its appetite for controversy around identity, this will have deep social and political repercussions. Already, regions which have historically been open to migrants are becoming more xenophobic, West Bengal being a case in point. Fears of cultural decline associated with decline in numbers, once a bhadralok staple, are now voiced in the open and become poll agendas.
It also means that we will get more poorly educated and unemployable youth than we get now. Already, surveys by UN bodies warn that Indians will increasingly lack the skills needed to give them employment at a level commensurate with sustenance requirements. This in turn, will lead to demands for regional reservation of jobs, which is already rearing its ugly head in Andhra Pradesh. Further, poorly trained people, as and when they get jobs, will enter the economy at lower levels and not find enough opportunities to skill up and rise on the economic ladder. This will not only stagnate the economy but also build up bitter anger. As movements from the JP movement onwards has shown, the wrath of the youth is something no government has the appetite to face.
Finally, there is the little matter of the most backward areas being also the most patriarchal. An exact correlation may not exist, but it is no secret that Kerala has the highest sex ratio in the country, with Sikkim not far behind. Punjab may be an outlier, but the situation is still better than in poorer Haryana, UP, MP and Rajasthan. What this means is the number of females available for a certain generation of males will decline. As the customary tendencies to marry of daughters declines and women increasingly choose their own matches or choose to stay single, it will be harder for low-skilled, low-earning men from patriarchal backgrounds (who typically lack sufficient social skills as well), to find brides. The situation will be similar to the Chinese scenario, but immensely complicated by the permissive attitude of the state towards a range of crimes against women, and the cultural differences that stand as deep gulfs between men and women of different castes, communities, regions, etc. etc. Expect a rise in crimes against women, as well as toxic masculinity arising from unfulfilled conjugal expectations.
And while we are on the topic of society and culture, let’s not forget that these backward states are also the hotbeds of Hindutva and the Hindi movement. With little capacity building for other languages in these states, the youth are almost completely dependent on the success of the Hindi movement to find jobs and maintain social standing in areas outside the core Hindi heartland. This movement can be expected to speed up as the pressure of youth in these backward areas increases even as the numbers of youth in the non-Hindi, better-off areas declines relatively. There is as yet little research on the correlation between the relative changes in demographic balance with the changing social currents and the growing preference for Hindutva among the populace of the country. And any change that takes place will have to be very gradual, since cultural mores are so deep set that percentage shifts in graphs do not immediately alter social proclivities. But the relative demographic dominance of the Hindi and Hindutva heartland is a fact that has to be faced, and states will have to figure out how to limit the impact of these ideologies without giving into regional chauvinism that threatens to weaken the foundations of the Indian Union.
All said, the future will be emptier. Emptier in terms of the seats in schools, the number of schools bustling with children, the number of offices with young employees and perhaps – and bear with me here – emptier local train compartments. The latter will also have more older people who are forced to work longer because they cannot be supported sufficiently in the old age by their children and/or the state. The compartments will also have more Hindi speaking people, who would have difficulty speaking other languages because of plain arrogance and a social education that never tried to integrate the languages of India beyond Hindi. The compartments will also have more men and less women. More and more of the men will be Hindi speaking with repressed desires. And above all, perhaps there will be lesser local trains, running at greater intervals, with less stoppages and lesser number of platforms. Will a day come when some of the bustling stations of today would have become old age homes, with nary a passenger boarding or alighting from a local that would run only a few times a day? Will we – the Generation X of the late years of the 20th Century – live to see this come about, or will our children, now babes in arms, inherit what seems like a dream today? And will this society be a good one to live in, better than that of today, where the tired and forlorn faces are replaced by something more promising? Those tired and forlorn faces will not have the answer, but it is time they found out what is in store for their children.