Overpopulation in India

I would like to take the liberty of writing something about an issue whose presence is a general knowledge in India, but people choose to live in denial of the its consequences and prefer to raise no voice against it.





Our country is the 2nd most populous country in the entire world, and is well on it's way to become the most populated by 2025. I firmly believe that this isn't something to be proud of. Even then, some political parties in our country choose to encourage families to produce more children so that the population of a particular religion remains high.



That graph is not a lie. India will have the lion's share of that population by the end of 2050.
If we specifically talk about India, the main reason for the increased birth is

• Poverty: It makes people living in that condition believe that the increased number of children in their houses would mean more people to earn money for them in future.
• Lack of proper awareness: People are not aware about the dire conditions, or they choose to live in denial of the existence if the immediate threat to their world because of population explosion.
• Illiteracy: It goes hand in hand with poverty.
• Our 'Culture': India has an age old norm of believing that sons are the bread earners of the family and hence, couples in past chose to produce children till a male child was born. Many chose to go further and continue producing even after that happened. This is slowly changing in urban India, but it still is widely prevalent in rural parts of the country.

The basic consequences of rise in population as everyone  faces today is

• Unemployment: Providing employment to a population as huge as India's is no easy feat. Many Indians remain jobless because of this very reason.
•  Provision of basic needs like food, housing, healthcare and education cannot keep up with the ever increasing population of the country.
• Land areas, water resources and forests are over exploited leading to their ultimate scarcity.

Well, I guess you can imagine what would happen if the growth of population is not brought under control. If the situation remains unchecked, the gap between the demand and supply of basic life necessities will keep increasing and the day is not far away when even the ethical people in our societies would have to resort to criminal acts just to keep themselves and their family alive. In short, the result is chaos. If the rates remain unchecked, I believe we will see this chaos with our very own eyes within next 50 years. Sounds terrible, right?
China (the only competitor we have) has taken very drastic measures to control their numbers so that they do not face such a situation. On the other hand, we are obsessed with the issues that should be least of our concerns in 21st century.
With mass murder out of the picture, the only solution to this problem is not just decreasing the rate of increase in population, but bringing that to negative as soon as possible. I believe we should have a policy similar to the one-child policy that other countries follow to avoid the upcoming catastrophe. In other words, families should not produce more than one child per family. For those of who thought, "Two child per family is pretty reasonable too", or anything similar to that, let me tell you that it is not reasonable enough. Doing simple math would tell you that anything more than one child per family would not result in a decrease in population. We should try to solve the problem and not postpone it. Unless India implements this one-child concept and revolutionize it, it will become impossible for us to live peacefully in future.
It is my personal opinion, but I would rather stay childless for lifetime than bring a soul into this world only for him/her to see the disaster our world would be facing in very near future.

PS: For half the people who don't understand sarcasm, the reference to mass murder was a joke.
PPS: Don't be ashamed of buying and using contraceptives. It is fine, really!