This write up on population was written way back probably in 1999-2000 and was awarded with special prize in a essay competition.
"With
relief, with
humiliation, with
terror, he realized that he too, was but
appearance, that another man was
dreaming him."
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins"(italics mine).
The face of the nation with another billion 'dreams'!
The relief comes from 'the faith' on human capital; 'the humiliation' because the Bible says that we all are product of a sin… And we all are carrying the guilt of our own existence with another billion guilts. 'The terror' comes from the demographic and statistical facts. The challenges and opportunities oscillate between the immediate past and future.
Gandhi, the Mahatma, once wrote, "A nation is happy that has no history". Is it a denial of demographic data? Is it a mere reminder of our own guilt (essentially a male guilt)? However, this is not an attempt to fix the guilt of a nation. Nevertheless, this is also an exercise in understanding the development of a nation. This is ethnography of a future nation.
In an age marked by the 'end of history', 'end of ideology' and the 'end of man', a UNDP Human Development Report1999, invests its optimism in the simple but powerful fact: "the real wealth of a nation is its people". Thus, begins the story.
India in a new millennium with a billion heads. Economists explain it in various ways. They coin technical terms and theoretical models to assess a nation's growth potentiality. Some say that 'head counting' matters. They establish 'tight statistical' link between development indicators and fertility rate. For them facts and figures are sacred. For others, it's altogether a different story.
India will cross the one billion mark on May 11,2000. For the demographers of the world, the D' day was the October 12,1999 as the world population was expected to have crossed the six billion mark on that day. The State of the World Population Report1999 ('6 Billion: A time For Choice', UNFPA) reminds that more than 95 per cent of the population growth takes place in the developing countries-- a significant one of which is India. The Report tells us that the United States is the only industrialized country that still registers significant increases in population and that is, largely as a result of immigration. In the context of India and third world countries, 'the Report' points us to the worst reproductive health, the highest rate of maternal mortality and lowest implementation rates for family planning methods-- generally under 15 per cent, a level which average developed country had reached by 1969.
Neo-Malthusian economists say that population explosion, as it exists in the countries like India, is an inevitable result of the uncontrolled reproductive behavior of human being. The theory of demographic transition rejects this view. It asserts that population explosion is a transitory phenomenon that occurs in the second stage of demographic transition, due to a rapid fall in the mortality rate without a corresponding fall in the birth rate. This school argues that presently India is in this second stage of demographic transition and is thus encountering a 'population explosion'. The 'population explosion' is both cause and consequence of the underdevelopment. However, this smooth equation between demography and development has its own shortcomings. Kuznetsian growth model with its faith on an inverse U-shaped relation between growth and inequality of income remains no more relevant. Mahabubul Haq's Human Development Reports have brought the 'Human Capital' in the center stage of the discourse of development. With this paradigm shift one has every reason to put her optimism in the great Indian reservoir of human resource.
The first world has always been very fearful of this vast reservoir. The cheap cost of human labour in India reduces the overall production cost of a commodity. In a global village of today this is not a minor threat. However, this is not a place to go into finer aspects of this discourse. We shall have to return to the harsh realities of India in new world order.
The World Development Report 1999/2000 put forward the idea that as nations and peoples enter the 21st century they will be confronted with the twin forces of globalization and localization. While the former is a supernational phenomenon with political overtones, later is a subnational phenomenon with economic implication. In order to cope with the global challenges solutions have to be found at local level; but apart from local insights, national and supernational insights and resources will be required to deal with them. Infrastructural inadequacy--housing, water and sanitation, primary education and health are some of the areas of prime importance for them. Opportunity awaits at the grass root level. We can transform challenges into opportunity only through identifying that part of human capital, which has been left at the margins of the development discourse. What we need is not the recovery of this 'body' but the 'voice' of this 'other'. We need to re-define this 'other' of nation.
This questioning leads us to the politico-ethical context of the relation between freedom, democracy, population and growth. In Senomics (economics of Amartya Sen) freedom is not simply the freedom to choose, but freedom from certain removable constraints on the functioning of human beings. We have to locate this freedom in the life of this marginalized, suppressed and dominated section of Indian society. There exists a wide gulf between the textual narrative of democracy and the actual narratives of the freedom of choice. We cant judge the state of Indian development from metropolitan perspective, what matters more is the life and thinking of the subaltern housewives and Mallahs and Mushars. Is it not ironical that the Mallahs (The traditional fisherfolks of Bihar), the Mushars and other belonging to the poorer sections of the society work as labourers in the ponds supposedly owned by them? Somni Devi, a women agricultural worker of Sohari Brahamotar village in Lakhnaur block of Madhubani district (Bihar) tells, "We survive on wages earned as workers or depend on fishing for a livelihood. The male members of our community have migrated to Punjab, Haryana and Delhi."
In this age, writes the UNDP Report 1999, " the collapse of space, time and borders may be creating a global village but not everyone can be a citizen. The global professional elite faces low borders, but billions of other find borders as high as ever".
Mallahs and Mushars are the witnesses of these internal borders. However, the future is not as dark as we often assume. For the first time in Bihar, reports 'The Frontline', ' a major initiative involving fisherwomen (Mallahins) was made possible last year in Riyam, a village in Jhanjharpur block of Madhubani district. Led by Gangia Devi, the women, who are traditionally engaged in making fishing nets and selling fish, stormed the male domain by casting the net themselves.'
This challenge to domination also generates opportunities for future development.
Amartya Sen points out, "ultimately, the focus has to be on what life we lead and, what we can or cannot do, can or cannot be." The grand strategy is to go back to basics. Statistical data deceive us completely. Mere presence of number doesn't change the situation much. The 1999 World Survey on 'Globalization, Gender and Work' dispels the notion that the presence of a larger number in the labour market indicates the general well being of women; rather, it emphatically states that only some women have been able to break in to better jobs that were previously dominated by men. The position of women's well being is closely linked with the problem of fertility, demography and development.
The problems are too many and too technical. Female infanticide has given way to female foeticide. Amniocentesis (the sampling of the amniotic fluid during the pregnancy by the insertion of a hollow needle into the uterus, which can also serve as a sex determination test.) is a terror for the thinkers of sustainable population growth. The government has passed the Pre-Natal Diagnostics (regulation and prevention of misuse) Act in 1994. The chapter III section5 (2) states, " No person conducting [pre-natal diagnostic procedures shall communicate… the sex of foetus by words, signs or in any other manner." However, again passing a law and administering it are two entirely different parts of the game. The scale of damage, whether physical, demographic, economic, environmental or political, is always socially determined. Here, the social status of 'second sex' becomes very crucial.
Lack of knowledge of their bodies and the processes that lead to conception is a major obstacle to women taking control of their fertility. Few girls know about their sexual intercourse until they experience it. Few realize that it may result in pregnancy until it actually does. The experience of Savitri, a lower class 'mother', narrates, "Before marriage I did not know how children could be conceived. When my brother got married, I knew that he and bhabhi would sleep together in a room, but I did not know that kids are conceived by doing such "deeds". When I began vomiting after my marriage my sasur got me medicines…I don’t know if my sasur understood…Only when everyone started saying "Give birth to a son" did I know that I had conceived."
Women's consciousness, however, is changing and they often want for their daughters what they could not attain themselves. The spread of primary and female education has played a great role in this regard. Kerala is an ideal case.
Kerala has in fact outsmarted even China as far as female education and fertility rate go. While the fertility rate in China fell from 2.8 to 2.0 between1979 (when the 'one child policy' and other coercive measures were instituted) and 1991, it fell from 3.0 to 1.8 in the same period in Kerala. The later has kept its lead over China both in female education and in fertility decline (by the middle of the Nineties, Kerala's fertility rate fell to 1.7 and China's to about 1.9). This shows the power of democracy over coercion. Economics of a nation is determined by the politics of 'social choice'.
Freedom of choice dominating over coercion, fertility rate as a social fact, relation between primary female education, demography and development, and the human capital of the nation, external threats, internal social hierarchy and the future of a nation ---topics and subtopics are too many. Different faces of the nation narrate different stories of development. One Billion faces, one Billion stories, More than one Billion opportunities. However, what matters is the narrator and perspective. The ethnography of a nation's future must deconstruct the silences of the nation. Each head counts, each one constructs its own circle of silence. One Billion circles, one Billion silences, one Billion voice…
Narratives of the nation continue.
