It tracks the thirty-three births a minute, two thousand an hour, forty-eight thousand a day, which calculates to nearly 12 million every year. That is roughly the size of Australia.
For some in India, this popular milestone is cause for celebration. As a current political slogan puts it: “Nothing’s impossible when one billion Indians work together.”
The reality of a billion in India is something else.
“It’s a cause for very serious concern,” says population expert Ashish Bose.
Bose says India has enough food for now, but each birth eats deeper into the country’s shrinking cropland and consumes more of its dwindling water supply. Each illness threatens to swamp the health care system, while millions of unemployed already flood the cities in search of work.
India’s Complex Challenge
Slowing the population growth, says Bose, will be a greater challenge than anything India has ever faced.
“It is as complex as producing a nuclear bomb,” says Bose, “Or shooting off a missile.”
Complex because the cultural roots of population growth in India run so deep.
“God said ‘Go forth and produce’ and we just went ahead and did exactly that,” says Author Shobha De.
De says Indians are aware of the need for birth control, but too many remain ignorant of contraception methods or are unwilling to discuss them. This is also a land still bound to ancient customs, such as producing a son.
“The pressure to produce the son is so predominant,” says De, “that a lot of families have more children than they actually want or can afford.”
300 million living in extreme poverty, while half the populations is still illiterate. More people is exactly what India does not need to celebrate.
“There’s very little to celebrate unless we can provide for our people, and at this point, India cannot,” says De. “I think of it more as a tragedy than something to be proud of.”
In the meantime, that relentless population clock just keeps on ticking and ticking
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