Effects and Possible Solutions of Overpopulation in India - Research Paper Example

Overpopulation in India - Its effects and possible solutions Overpopulation is seen as a threat in the present age as the issues of global warming and sustainable development are coming to the surface. The world’s resources are depleting rapidly. Overpopulation means there are more people than the resources to address their concerns. India is included in the list of countries where population is increasing at a dangerous rate. The level of over-population in India can be estimated from the fact that three of the ten most populated cities in the world are in India. These three cities are Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. In 2011, with a population growth rate of 1.34, India is ranked the 86th largest country in terms of the population growth rate of the total 230 countries in the world (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). This paper looks into the effects of overpopulation in India and proposes solutions for it. India encapsulates a lot of power owing to the fact that it is the tenth largest industrial country in the world. The technical work force in India is the third largest in number in the whole world. The economic liberalization has exposed India to a lot of opportunities. Businesses in India in the present age have developed to the magnitude of international competition. The rising volume of exports has encouraged the investors to trust India as a profitable land. Presently, India is very close to becoming a superpower in Asia at least, but overpopulation is a big hurdle in that. A typical Indian family contains at least three children. Age of 32.2 per cent of the Indian population is below 14 years, the age from 15 to 64 years accounts for 63 per cent of the total population whereas people older than 65 years make only 4.8 per cent of the total. Despite the overall increase in the population, there has been a noticeable and better change in the population growth rate of India over the years. The population growth rate of India in the 1980s was 2.2 while in 2003, it was found to be as low as 1.47 (CIA World Factbook cited in grinnell.edu, n.d.). Despite immense reduction in the population growth rate over the years, 1.47 was still above the global population growth rate average that equaled 1.33 in 2003. Since 2003, there has been a further improvement in the population growth rate of India that has fallen from 1.47 in 2003 to 1.34 in 2011. India’s National Population Commission establishes the attainment of the zero population growth rate till 2045 as its objective, but critics find it too long a duration to achieve the stable population. It is generally believed that India should have attained the stable population till 2015 in order to be able to take timely actions to counter for the challenges caused by the overpopulation in the past. Growth rate of a country’s population depicts the amount and severity of challenges that country’s government is likely to experience in the near future as the needs of the people for the jobs and infrastructure change as a consequence of the overpopulation. India has been an independent country for more than 50 years now. Still, 50 per cent of the Indian population earns less than a dollar in a day. Indian people have a lot of financial burden. The man is often the only earning individual in the family and all of the remaining members live on his earning. In an attempt to have a helping hand, people tend to have more and more children and hope to have sons. The son comes with a lot of responsibility. In early teenage, he is expected to join the workforce and start earning for his own well-being as well as for the well-being of the family. Number of the child laborers in India exceeds 100 million. “India is one of the poorest nations in the world with a Gross National Income per capita of US$460 and 40% of Indians live off just one dollar a day, hardly enough to even cover the basic necessities of life. The unemployment rate is 4.400% and out of the labor force, 60% work in agriculture, 23% in services and 17% in industry” (Blakeman,n.d.). Illiteracy and poverty are both the causes and effects of the child labor. In spite of the fact that the government has taken a lot of initiatives for increasing the literacy rate of the Indian people, 48 per cent of the adult Indians are illiterate (overpopulation.org, 2011). Malnourishment is a potential effect of overpopulation. 53 per cent of the children that are below five years of age are malnourished. The majority of the malnourished population of India lives in the rural areas in which the people have lesser variety in food and the income is lower. The National Family Health Survey of India has found that 45 per cent of the malnourished children in India live in the urban regions and the rest are the inhabitants of the rural area. Malnourishment is a big problem particularly in the cities of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Almost 30 per cent of the newborns in India are underweight. Malnourishment of children is also linked with the illiteracy of the parents. Women that are either illiterate or undereducated neither take good care of themselves nor of their children, and thus normally give birth to babies that are below the normal weight. Children that die in India account for 25 per cent of the total child deaths that occur in the whole world every year. The competition among the family members for the medical care and food causes the larger families to be more susceptible to the malnourishment as compared to the smaller families. Delayed complementary feeding also increases a child’s susceptibility to malnutrition. Obesity in India is a very insignificant health problem because of the inability of the excessively poor people to acquire food that is more than necessary in quantity. Besides, a vast majority of the Indian people are pure vegetarians, so the intake of fat is limited as compared to other nations that are meat lovers. The large agricultural sector and the rapid growth of economy are two of the most obvious factors that are making India’s supply of water lesser than required. After conducting an analysis of the supply vs demand of water in India, UNICEF said in the report, “There will be constant competition over water, between farming families and urban dwellers, environmental conservationists and industrialists, minorities living off natural resources and entrepreneurs seeking to commodify the resources base for commercial gain” (Brooks, 2007). The mismanagement of water resources, overpopulation and over-pumping are causing the supply of water in India to dwindle rapidly. The problem is further exacerbated by the change of climate. The unpredictable weather conditions cause the water from glaciers and rainfall to diminish rapidly. The increase of unbalance between the demand and supply of water in India will soon cause the country to encounter the challenges of shortage of food, conflict and intrastate unrest. The industrial, domestic and agricultural sectors in India consumed about 829 billion cubic meters of water on an annual basis that is equivalent to the size of the Lake Erie. The demand of potable water in India is likely to double till the year 2050, thus far exceeding the supply of water. The water crisis in India is directly linked with the problem of overpopulation. The rivers in India are very populated and the government is not quite able to supply the urban population with freshwater. This has encouraged a significant population to consume groundwater, which in turn, causes the underground aquifers to deplete. The problem is no less significant in the rural areas, wherein 30 per cent of the people are deprived of the drinking water. No more than 7 of the total 35 states of India have the supply of clean water equal to the demand of the residents. 37 per cent people in India consume unsafe water while 71 per cent people are deprived of the facilities of sanitation. India is exposed to increased challenges of environmental protection with the growth of the population. The World Development Indicators report that was written in the year 1997 said that up to 1 billion people in India do not have access to clean water, 1.5 billion people live in extreme levels of air pollution while 2 billion Indians are deprived of sanitation (Nagdeve, 2002). The growing population has many devastating effects upon the environment. “Population impacts on the environment primarily through the use of natural resources and production of wastes and is associated with environmental stresses like biodiversity, air and water pollution and increased pressure on arable land” (Nagdeve, 2002, p. 3). The level of gravity of the environmental problem in India can be estimated from the fact that currently, India happens to be the sixth largest producer of the greenhouse gases in the world. With respect to the speed of production of the greenhouse gases, India is the second fastest country in the world. The rapid growth of population in India has rendered the government unable to accord the supply of the service of sanitation, water supply, disposal and treatment of the waste water, storm water drainage, and the management of solid waste with the growing needs of the population. Clean tap water is supplied to no more than 18 per cent of the people in the rural areas of India and 35 per cent of the people in the urban areas of India (Nagdeve, 2002, p. 5). This has caused immense increase in the levels of all types of pollution in India over the decades. The problems of pollution in India are further aggravated by the illogical placement of factories in the sub-urban and urban regions, inappropriate housing, traffic congestion, accumulation of the garbage and poor drainage. These factors not only deteriorate the environment, but also cause the people many health issues. Air pollution causes respiratory and other diseases while the water pollution causes the acute water borne diseases. Overpopulation causes poverty which in turn causes environmental pollution. The environmental pollution again promotes poverty in the society. Natural resources of India are more required by the poor people than the richer lot because the former lacks access to the external resources. People in the rural areas dwell in forests because they provide them with food and shelter, ponds as well as pastures for the cattle. “Population pressure driven overexploitation of the surface and underground water resources by the poor has resulted into contamination and exhaustion of the water resources” (Nagdeve, 2002, p. 5). The growth rate of population is equal to the ratio between the birth rate and the death rate. Population increases when the numerator is larger in value than the denominator in the birth rate to death rate ratio and decreases when the birth rate is lesser than the death rate. Thus, there are two fundamental ways to control the overpopulation i.e. either decrease the birth rate or increase the death rate. The second option is not consistent with the values of a developing and progressing country like India that promises better standard of living and improved healthcare facilities to its people. Thus, the only way to control the overpopulation is controlling the birth rate. Decreasing the benefits to families that produce more than one child is a strategy that has been implemented by a lot of countries to control the overpopulation. Although this strategy can be quite effective, yet it can prove a potential means of discrimination against the girls, since the people of India generally look up to having boys more than girls. Conventionally, the policies adopted by the government of India to control the population have met with failure. These policies include the establishment of the sterilization camps as well as the forced vasectomies by the former Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977. The methods of injection birth-control that have been lately implemented by the government of India have also been heavily criticized for their negative health consequences. “…the measures being considered should not involve draconian laws aimed only at results which neglect the rights and potential usefulness of the people” (grinnell.edu, n.d.). The government of India has conventionally maintained an uncooperative attitude with the agencies and organizations whose efforts are directed at the reduction of population and sexually transmitted diseases in the people. The government of India has taken measures to increase the funding for the abstinence only programs. The government has denied the provision of sex education in the schools in India. “The Committee on Petitions, composed of members of the Parliament of India (Rajya Sabha) and headed by the Indian Peoples Partys Venkaiah Naidu, has decided that Indias "social and cultural ethos are such that sex education has absolutely no place in it”” (Vijeyarasa, 2009). However, In spite of the less than optimal success of the governmental policies and strategies directed at reducing the population of India to date and the overall growth in the population in India, the fertility rate has shown a decline over the five decades since the independence. Within 50 years, the fertility rate has declined from 6 children per woman to 3.4 children per woman. Despite the limited access to the contraception, roughly 30 million Indians opt for them. This speaks of the fact that the governmental measures have made an impact, even if they were not very effective in reducing the population. There has been a decrease in population with the increase of the literacy rate of India. This indicates that education can be used as a tool to control the growth of population in India. Government should teach the importance of controlling population as well as the benefits of contraception. India has shown immense improvement in the agricultural sector over the decades. The agricultural training programs that were used in the past had to main flows, “The programs are either too generic because they aim to be highly scalable, or too costly because they require experts to provide advice on an individual basis” (Ganghi and Green cited in Good Worldwide, 2010). The Microsoft Research India has launched the Digital Green Program in 2006 that employs novel techniques to promote better agricultural practices in the villages. Such projects are compulsory for the employment of the less educated and illiterate people in India. As a result, poverty is reduced. More people receive education and the drivers of overpopulation are minimized. Concluding, India’s population is increasing at a very high rate because of several factors that include but are not limited to high fertility rate, migration of people from the rural to urban areas in large numbers, low mortality rate, and industrialization. The rapid increase in the population in India causes poverty which in turn causes the depletion of the local resources which are the fundamental providers of livelihood for both the present and future generations. The growth of population has many negative implications upon the environment. The policy makers in India are primarily responsible for the present overpopulation in India and its consequences. The policy makers in India have conventionally paid little attention to the planning of a widespread policy of population and have rather placed more emphasis upon the development. It was not until the late 1970s that Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India abolished the constitution, thus forcible sterilizing the people. The common people of India were so frightened as a result of this that the population policy of India became stagnated for decades to follow. In order to find an objective solution for the problem, it is imperative that both kinds of overpopulation are targeted. The consequences of overpopulation are interlinked. Thus, solving one problem may play a big role in the solution of another. The more pressing issue if identified will help the government deal with the problem in a more efficient and convenient way. To achieve this, the policy makers in India need to review their population policy with an intention of making it bolder. In order to control the growing population in India and to improve the health and safety conditions, it is imperative that sex education is provided in the schools in India. For this, the government of India needs to promote such programs as the Adolescents Education Program (AEP) of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Birth control is the only way to control the population. People need years of education and organized convincing effort by the government of India to change their attitudes towards sex and family for the better. References: Central Intelligence Agency. (2011). The World Factbook. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2002rank.html?countryName=India&countryCode=in®ionCode=sas&rank=86#in. Blakeman, M. (n.d.). Childhood Malnutrition in India. Niagara District High School. Retrieved from http://www.worldfoodprize.org/documents/filelibrary/images/youth_programs/research_papers/2005_papers/NiagaraDistrictHighSchool_E2524280296E6.pdf. Brooks, N. (2007, Aug.). Imminent water crisis in India. Retrieved from http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/wbp/global-water-crisis/606. Good Worldwide. (2010, Sep. 23). Digital Green Advances Indian Agriculture Through Viral Video. Retrieved from http://www.good.is/post/digital-green-advances-indian-agriculture-through-viral-video/. grinnell.edu. (n.d.). Overpopulation in India. Retrieved from http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/gds/f03/gds111-01/gdsintro/countryreport/student_projects/india/gds/overpopulation.html. Nagdeve, D. A. (2002). Environment and Health in India. International Institute for Population Sciences. Mumbai-88, India. Retrieved from http://www.iussp.org/Bangkok2002/S09Nagdeve.pdf. Overpopulation.org. (2011, Nov. 6). Population Dynamics of India. Retrieved from http://www.overpopulation.org/India.html. Vijeyarasa, R. (2009). Indian Government Says No to Sex Education in Schools, Retrieved from http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/08/11/indian-government-says-no-sex-education-schools. Read More