Overpopulation, there's no room in jail...

To call overpopulation a 'myth' is to take an extreme stand on an issue which has some relevance to India's problems. However, it is fair to say that the problem has been exaggerated over the decades, and has been used by successive governments to push shocking birth control policy measures.

Sanjay Gandhi's sterilization drives aimed at men during the emergency drew widespread criticism, and was eventually canned. However, what continued were systematic measures to continue this policy, this time against the 'weaker' and 'submissive' sex. By providing incentives for men to get their wives to have vasectomies, a number of dodgy, on-trial methods were used on women across rural India. The side effects were hardly taken into consideration, as the policy makers looked at short term fixes for what they saw as a spiraling population problem.

The manner in which the government approached the issue has much to with the influence of Communist China. In view of China's growing population, the CCCP introduced the one-child policy. India, taking a cue from this development, reacted in an alarmist manner and saw mass birth control as the only recourse to curb what was a highly overstated problem.

As Ashwin Mahesh of India Together puts it, "much of India, unlike a large portion of, say, China, is perfectly habitable, and arable land is plentiful throughout the subcontinent." So clearly, it was fallacious to assume that the Chinese population problem would manifest itself similarly in India.

What lay at the bedrock of the government's fears was entirely Malthusian—too many people grabbing at too few resources. However, the real issue here was the disproportionate distribution of India's wealth, despite the best of Nehruvian intentions. It seemed as if there were too few resources between the populations, but this was never the case. Rather, a large section of society was being given access to a very small percentage of the resources. The rest of the resources were trapped with a few, courtesy the bureaucratic system and an unshakeable caste system, among other factors.

The government used the ‘population explosion’ as their one-size-fits-all reason for all the economic and social problems of the country. The years of ‘socialist’ governance did little to examine or curb the rising divide between the haves and the have-nots in our country. Successive governments, post Nehru, blamed their inadequacies on the uncontrollable population. Rather, the nation’s resources should have been more equitably harnessed and distributed.