The plastics industry boomed in the 1970s when our rulers told our people to make fewer babies. The dairy industry, already on a high milkmark, should boom if Telugu Desam MP Kalisetti Appalanaidu gets people to make more babies.
What’s the connection? Hold on. First listen to India’s population story that’s already a statistical farce, and may soon be a political tragedy.
Till the 1920s, Mother Nature used to balance our population. Plagues and poxes, floods and famines, droughts and disasters killed as many every year as were born. The birth rate in 1922 was 48.1 per 1,000 people; death rate 47.2. It meant, as many people died in India as were born.
Soon the advent of modern medicine, improved hygiene and better diet began to let people live longer. Death rate dropped to 36.3 in census 1931, while birth rate remained 48.1. Fewer died than were born. Our British rulers didn’t bother. The Great War, during which they had got more than a million Indians to fight the Germans and the Turks, had convinced them that it was good to have more cannon fodder. They found the mistake during the next war when neither they nor Mother India could get enough food for all Indians. Read accounts of the Bengal famine.
Illustration: Job P.K.
Free India woke up to the baby boom after the 1971 census gave the birth rate as 39 against a death rate of 17.4 per thousand. More than two babies were getting born against every one Indian dying! Worried rulers began telling virile couples, who had three, to get sterile. They launched campaigns to popularise vasectomy and tubectomy, but few turned up. Soon crown prince Sanjay Gandhi took up depopulation as an Emergency mission; the failed car-maker came down heavily on baby-making. The rest is political history.
Not that all vasectomies were forced; many were voluntary, especially in the south. Do-gooders who brought people to surgeries were offered alarm clocks, lamps, watches, fans and transistor radios. The ones who went under the knife were given purses of cash, dhotis, towels and, in several places, a very useful bathroom accessory –the now-ubiquitous plastic bucket, then a novelty in small towns and villages where people had been used to the heavier iron pails.
Maybe a coincidence, but that was the time when the plastic goods industry was booming. The plastic bucket, which gave a heavy lift to the vasectomy drive, helped the industry acquire a ‘Brite’ future.
Today the south, where people have since been making fewer babies and rulers have been giving better health care, finds that it may lose out politically. The federal rulers, who have built a larger parliament house than Herbert Baker’s, are planning to allot seats to states based on a fresh headcount. In the division of the power pie, the crowded north would grab more. Foul, cry many southern rulers; you are punishing us for our good governance.
Tamil thalaivan M.K. Stalin, seeking to be the champion of the south, has adopted two tactics. One, make a sound and fury, get the Centre to amend the statute and put off the delimitation. Two, encourage his Tamil makkal, their Malayali brothers, Kannada cousins and Telugu biddas to make more babies so that by the time the headcounters arrive, there will be more southies to stand up and be counted.
Appalanaidu, whose Telugu Desam doesn’t want to make a sound and fury but is worried about losing the power pie in Parliament, is lending a hand. He has offered a cow to every mother if her third kid is a boy, and Rs50,000 if it is a girl.
Let’s now wait for a baby boom and a dairy boom in Andhra.
prasannan@theweek.in