Baby bubble

China recently dumped its hard hitting (and in-bad-taste) birth control slogans for more matured slogans. Some banned ones were really bad, like “Less kids, more pigs”, or “One more baby means one more tomb”. Instead, now there will be more subtle messages like “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children”. Makes sense! After all, China is the world’s largest country by population and they do need to reduce their population - so there is an effort towards that for the last 28 years, and now they are making minor changes to their approach.

That brings one question to my mind: What exactly are we doing to control India’s population? I don’t see any effort by our government or any other agency towards this. Is it because we don’t perceive this as a problem? After all, we are very proud to proclaim we are the world’s “largest” democracy! It makes me only half proud! I mean, I am glad we have a functioning democracy, quite unlike most of our neighboring countries. But how can a huge population be a thing to be proud of, especially when most of the population is struggling to make a decent living?

7 comments:

R said...

Sadly, the babus also believe in more babies to eventually be involved in what they do all the money, er, social work. And no one will notice these steps. Our nation is too busy carrying out Operation Majnus and killing dogs as of now. They'll perhaps wake up when it's too late... I hate to even joke about it now.

RB said...

Efforts are made but not at a scale that is required. They're half-hearted. And a lot of it is related to the fact that we are a democracy.

Subhadip said...

@RT
Sadly, true.

@RB
I agree. Autocracy of a good leader is better than democracy of fools?

~ Deeps ~ said...

i will agree with RB comment......efforts are there but they have resulted in results mostly in urban centres.......hopefully it will drill down to rural areas too

Subhadip said...

@Deeps
I don't think results in urban area is due to campaigns or any other effort. People in cities can't afford too many babies.

IG said...

Come to think about it, Democracy is probably the reason for the increasing population of India. Politicians are just too scared to antagonize any specific group of people in fear of losing their vote bank. I sincerely believe that this would not have been the case if India had a different governance structure although I do not think that autocracy is the right way either.

Subhadip said...

@IG
Unfortunately, sincerity and votes may not go hand in hand. Even if an honest politician (I know its kind of an oxymoron) takes a drastic step, all others will be after his neck, even if they know that is the right step to take.

Autocracy is definitely not the way.