All agree that population growth is one of India's most serious problems. We have surely moved a long way from the 1950s, when Pandit Nehru had reportedly told J.R.D. Tata, one of the earliest advocate of population control in India, that population was India's strength. The intellectual underpinning of this Malthusian line of thinking is that population growth puts a strain on limited national resources and significantly negates the developmental efforts of the state. This is patently false, and exposes the prevalence of the mind-set that even in these times of liberalisation, tends to look at the state for promoting economic development. By passing the blame on to the population for prevalence of poverty in the country, and much of the other ills, our leaders conveniently ignore their own culpability in framing policies that restricted freedom and choice, and chained the entrepreneurial skills of the people to solve their own problems.
Lets take a look at some of the fallacies.
First, that of natural resources. As noted demographer and economist, the late Prof. Julian L. Simon of University of Maryland, USA, Lord Peter Bauer, and others have repeatedly pointed out, there is no meaningful scarcity in natural resources although the world's population has increased rapidly over the last few centuries. Prof. Simon in 1980 had a famous bet with Prof. Paul Ehrlich and a few others over the price of a few select natural resources. The bet was settled in 1990, and it was seen that the real prices of all the five metals had indeed fallen often dramatically. Not comfortable with the economic argument, many population control advocates these days point to Kerala as the model.