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There’s an old saw about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, and a perennial illustration is the way so many have learnt to think of more humans as a problem.  The health secretary of Karnataka the other day, as our staffer reported, declaimed the official national philosophy that ‘most of our resources will get exhausted if the population continues to increase the same way’, adding, for good measure, that ‘parents who want to have more than two children should be put behind bars’.
Children are supposed to be an expression of love and hope; to talk of jailing people who think like this is an odd sense of values. But suppose the defence is that he’s saying something unpalatable, but necessary. Examine the facts on the correlation between population density and development. Kerala has 820 people per sq km; Rajasthan has 120.
Shouldn’t the latter be well ahead of the former? Or, shouldn’t Jaisalmer district in Rajasthan, with nine persons per sq km, be well ahead of the rest of the state? Just how did Hong Kong, with 6,500 per sq km, or Singapore with 6,800, get to the top of the income table,  when India’s average is 350?The point is that a human doesn’t only come with a mouth and a stomach, he/she also come with a pair of hands and legs to work, and something remarkable called the brain.  Countries that get to the top invest in people and in the infrastructure to enable productive work. Sensible countries encourage immigration, instead of worrying about the effects on resources; it not only has a direct correlation with economic growth of the sustained variety, but also leads to a multiplication of those very resources. Not natural resources, did you say? Check out the work of the late Julian Simon, who made a career of debunking the population myth; for instance, the story of the bets he placed with various academics on the long-term prices of scarce natural resources and the outcome. Population growth itself follows a natural trajectory; advanced countries have for decades  been adding incentives to women to have more children, but there still aren’t. Remove the worries on health, education and jobs, and the supposed population ‘problem’ will solve itself. And, meanwhile, for a responsible policymaker to speak of jailing people for loving, and wanting children, is criminal.
Sriram Savarkar ©Hinduism is more a way of life than a method of worship. Dharmo Rakshati RakshithahaIf you protect Dharma, Dharma will in turn protect you. Hindus, If people slap you once, slap them twice!