This still shouldnot stop us from doing things to stop the population spurt in bimaru states where in evn the male female ratios are at all time low. As for politicians I am waiting for a day when we will have intelligent debates on policies than temple/masjid crap and banning cow slaugter bills. Like gurudev tagore said when will my country awake
For people who believe that poverty in India is simply going to disappear, this article should be an eye-opener. India will continue to be plagued by poverty, unless radical steps are taken to remove it. This present liberalisation will only make matters worse, because behind the glittering statistics on industrial growth which are presented us every day in our urban dailies, there are 230 million hungry people. That makes the largest number of hungry people in any single country in the world.
In an otherwise well written article, towards the end, the author has mentioned that subsidies should be eliminated. I want to state very emphatically that the government has been misleading people by saying that there is a lot of subsidy in the economy which is hurting other sectors, I think, it is the biggest lie, the so called subsidy is nothing but a result of complete inefficency and lack of accountability, there is no concept of costing or cost control or cost mangement in our huge, unproductive government undertakings, 2 give just 2 examples
people say that BEST is making a loss, long back Tata had offred to run the buses and charge just 10 ps as ticket and yet show a profit, they were never given a chance
It is known that petrol cost, even after importing and refining costs a mere Rs 15 per litre but is sold at Rs 35 per litre,
Has anyone seen the garbage collection armies on the streets of Bombay, never less than 10-15 people when not more than 2-3 are sufficient,
Well, we have inbuilt inefficiencies which are now called subsidies
Unless we get the max productivity from every rupee spent, this futile argument will go on
If you consider that the GDP grows evry year the amount spent on the Education might have decreased in % points while it could have grown as the amount spent on it.Even the Def budget of the country's been decreasing in percentage of total....
"The subsidy fattened elite,which benefits most from the state's largesse"
Think Again before you say that again Sir" The subsidies were divided a long time back into a below poverty and above poverty. and very few of the above poverty line use the PDS system considering that the subsidies are nearly nil or the cost between open market and PDS is almost equal.
The subsidy on petroleum products is beng phased out and the milk "WE" buy normally doesnt get any subsidy
The subsidy on fertilizers doesnt get to the people sir" it's paid to the companies (while the user buys it in black market most of the time)
And more than anythign else you are forgetting that the "more" are paying for the "less"s benifit though they are not getting any thing - other than being pushed asked to cough up more for this moth ridden society which considers the "elite" to be the problem of all evils.
It is not correct to say that population is not the problem. population is a problem. it will be good if all the 100+ crore people of the country are productive but how do we make so many people productive...we also have to provide basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and education. The author is correct in mentioning that higher the ration of productive people, better will be the overall productivity of the nation. But the population has an impact on this ration of productive people (he has missed this aspect).
We can take the analogy of a farm. We can increase the output of the farm by planting more plants but only to a certain extent. I hope that he and all of us will realize the need to stabilize our population.
Mohan, Wonderful piece of writing... Often in a live debate or a discussion main threads of thoughts get blown away.. But people (like mohan) should take the time and effort to again reflect, collate and compose such articles to make people aware.
Being a student of economics and business studies. I totally agree with Mohan. It is not the population that is the problem, it the population without anything that needs attention and addressing!
The author's views are not supported by realities and facts on the ground. It is precisely because we have to educate and provide medical facilities to such a large number of people it is an herculean task. This consumes large amounts of money which is difficult to find given the size of economy now. We have progressed substantially from what we inherited from British rule. However, these achievements have not been fully reflected in per capita terms because of population. Just look around it is the family that has lesser number of childern who are able to educate their children better and look after them better. If you cannot feed and look after one child properly then why have ten children?? No one is taking away the rights of citizens to have as many children as they want. Law makers should first be seen to be setting an example therefore, by making them ineligible to contest if they have more than 2 children the message gets loud and clear that its necessary to control population growth. Regarding the statistics given by the author to support his thesis dependcy ratio etc... I am reminded of a saying about Statistics... Lies, Damned lies, Statistics.. (Statistics ranks 1).
