Indian state proposes two-child policy, stringent measures for violators
economictimes.indiatimes.com
economictimes.indiatimes.com
India is one of the few countries with a favorable demographic future right now. The United States and France are also doing ok too (with immigration).
But most of Europe and Asia (especially China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan) are facing huge problems: a halving of the population from its peak. And more importantly than the total number of people is the demographic pyramid structure is lost and is difficult to rebuild without a big baby boom (unlikely to happen in those countries).
For India to become a superpower in 2100 (no guarantees it will be) it shouldn't ruin its demographic outlook (like China famously did).
For earth in total, it would be great to see a smaller number of humans.
Our paradigm is all mixed up. It’s upside down.
Why do casinos earn billions while exploiting the vulnerable, meanwhile hospitals struggle to get funding? Why do tobacco companies earn billions and poison the population while schools struggle to provide chalk for their teachers? Why does an executive for a superfluous cosmetics or designer clothing company get paid 1000X while we struggle to find enough social workers to try to relieve the massive mental health crises in the west?
Why is it difficult to get paid well in an environmental startup, but easy to get paid well in online betting startup? Why does top talent build products that inflict immeasurable damage to children, teenagers and adults, rather than attempting to solve the ecological crisis we face?
The juxtapositions I have used I believe are completely solvable by a realignment of the way we govern economic policy and what we as a society value. I don’t think it’s a utopian vision, but rather a realistic and a needed realignment.
Realignments need to be made, because what I see today is that our world economy is a destructive debt machine that ultimately is failing the planet and it’s inhabitants
Also, social work mostly sucks. It pays terribly, sure, but even without that it’s some of the most exhausting and potentially soul destroying work you can do.
I agree that alignments and incentives need to be adjusted, but I wouldn’t claim to know how.
As the population declines, and it should, technology and policy will change to make things work. Better use of automation, better end of life care policies, managing death instead of “doing everything you can”, etc.
I am not saying that it is impossible, but it is definitely hard. Which means psychologically hard, too. Without contact with living people, you are likely to go mad in your bed, even if your physiological needs are taken care of.
Is it, in any real terms?
> and improved health care
Doesn’t this make the problem worse? I.e. longer lifespan for the aging population, and even more demand for healthcare professionals from the limited set of younger workers.
So far, we have increased our lifespans up to 85 or even 90 years, but our healthspans are significantly shorter and those last 10-15 years are spent in state of partial or complete dependency on others.
Unless we can do a lot more in the longevity field and stretch healthspan of old people significantly, we won't be able to meet the total demand for workforce in care.
By the time I am in an old fokes home I don't need somebody to carry me to the toilet, I can just activate my drone and fly there. That should help with the pressure.
Or so I hope.
There is some evidence that stem cells can alleviate arthritis, so we may yet benefit from better treatments thereof.
I would assume the drone would move me and then we would finally have a bidet/toilet combo to fix the rest.
I don't mean that drones will be able to fix every problem, just that they will be one component in helping older people stay mobile and reduce the care necessary.
India is not meeting / maintaining 8% growth to just keep up with employment. Current TFR is going to generate 100s of millions of excessive idle / impoverished workers that's going to drag on development. It's a demographic curse not dividend, which are already milked in their most productive states from memory. And they will not be able to develop via manufacturing because automation/geopolitics means world will not concentrate global production in one country again. Their future looks like 1.7B with major proportions trapped in subsistent agriculture and informal economy.
In China even after family planning averted 300M births, country still has 600M barely above middle income and significant proportions in agriculture + informal system, but at least much of country has increasing per capita wealth to better weather demographic bomb and problems being addressed. Difference is most of India doesn't look like it will develop beyond relying on population pyramid to manage growth, which will eventually hit carrying capacity constraints. By 2100, PRC is going to be a somewhat wealthy per capita country with ~900M population & 80%+ urbanization rate. A big middle-income Japan. India is going to be a poor per capita country with 1.7B population, with significant numbers trapped in rural areas. A bigger but still poor India.
These conversations miss the fact that the actual distribution of the people in the country is very relevant. If you have ever been to UP, you would know how it is overflowing with people.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_ter...
Yes, Alaska or Estonia could live with a TFR of 3.0 for a while. Uttar Pradesh not so much. 200 million people crowded in a state smaller than Germany is already on the edge.
Instead we'll just kill the extra children.
The only intervention supported by data is providing and mandating access to good education, jobs, birth control and enforcing legal rights to women. Nothing else even comes close.
This policy is being proposed in UP, which performs very poorly on women's equality compared to higher GDP states.
All they have to look at the birth rates in southern states with high education outcomes for women - Kerala,Karnataka and TN
1) educating women must take at least ten years to show up in birth rates
2) women with fewer children might have an easier time educating themselves & getting the snowball going
It is easy to say educate women but when there are so many women less resource/finance it is hard to scale. This policy will help educating women in a sense that there is incentive.
The draft is not about killing extra children but its about preventing the birth. The draft says it will even provide free education to single child. The policy also says it provides incentive to family that follows the rule. Those who don't follow simply wont get incentive.
I think this is correct way to handle population. India is largely overpopulated anyway. And there is constant pressure on resource.
And lastly, its not like China policy where someone is forced. India is democratic country and I think this is a good policy at least on paper. Regarding implementation we will see in future.
There are many problems in life that are hard. The difficulty level of the problem can not be used an excuse. You can decide to avoid tackling hard problems and let someone else take care of it if it's "too hard".
> I think this is correct way to handle population. India is largely overpopulated anyway. And there is constant pressure on resource.
What number would make India "not so populated"? How do you come up with this number?
History has taught us that when decisions are made largely based on ideological / moral concerns, that connection with reality is severed and the outcome tends to be, as one would expect, negative if not entirely catastrophic.
This was an important aspect of the world we live in 100 years ago, but it is even more so today, because system complexity and degree of non-linear effects has increased exponentially. Humans are not in any way able to change the system they live in, top-down, regardless of how many of them -still- indulge in this sort of magical thinking. Rather, they should strive to first understand the (localized) parts of the system that directly surround them, and then effect change from the bottom-up, in harmony with the rules and flows of that systemic environment.
In other words, realpolitik should be the order of the day.
Too hard within context of current Indian institutional capabilities, and more importantly requires generations to pay off / take too long. Necessary long term goal, but doesn't avert 400M+ projected Indian births in an already overpopulated country that needs to maintain above 8% growth just to keep up with employment. Which they're not meeting. For reference height of PRC / China export manufacturing only supported ~400M jobs. Automation + geopolitics means India completely missed out prospect of concentrating global manufacturing. There's not much on the horizon but continuing with massive subsistent agriculture with massive idle / under / unemployment. High TFR + poverty + inadequate growth = generating more net unemployment and instability every year, which cause more governance problems = overpopulation spiral.
Family planning is a viable stop gab that's relatively enforceable, immediately. It's a band aid solution paid in later demographic bomb that may or may not be averted / mitigated with development or technology. Status quo is geometric poverty population growth that's going to hit carrying capacity of geography. 100s of millions of excessed impoverished people that will drag development. For context PRC one child policy averted 300M+ births, even now 600M of country is barely middle income. There are just too many people. Sure a demographic bomb coming but it's better to manage a demographic bomb with high wealth per capita. World needs heterodox policies to address end of population driven social and economic structures. India needs to prevent 100s millions more births ASAP and hope some of these policies work.
By your logic, if we needed more babies you would stop educating women ? Education and baby making are orthogonal issues.
Stopping to educate women and limiting our ability to make own decisions would probably made women have less children. It would however be unethical, cruel and oppressive.
Educating women is one possible way to deal with the issue, that doesn't mean it is the _only_ way. Like someone else said, it will take at least a generation for effects to kick in. On the other hand, the policies that the article refers to can be effective immediately (and also applied together with other measures such as educating women).
Also, there is no binary thinking involved in what I wrote. This effect is real and repeated itself multiple times.
Hyperbolic much? I agree there might be better ways but everything mentioned only has incentives and seems like a much lighter version of the Chinese policy.
They're not proposing 'enforcing' it at all, 'just' disincentivising it; which will equally affect people moving into that state regardless of whether they were before they had a third child or not.
It is a common trope by the Hindu right wing that Muslims are breeding like rabbits in India and may become larger in number than the Hindus.. and the way to control Muslims is by coming up with measures to restrict the rights of those with more than 2 children.
The Hindu right wing has been actively asking Hindus to have many children.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/Produce-...
The truth is that the fertility rate (TFR) has been reducing drastically for Muslims as well as Hindus.. though the Muslims have a slightly higher fertility rate but there is no way the Muslims are going to overtake the Hindus in population.
https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/muslim-women-family-plan...
I don't see a problem with this at all. Overpopulation may be the most important issue of our lifetime. I'm not a fan of excessive government control, but incentivizing low birthrates is our only hope of saving the environment.
The incentives/disincentives don't seem nice to me, rewarding 'voluntary sterilisation'...
I suppose I agree in general the concept of such policies is.. ok... But I don't think any rewards or penalties should be based on anything permanent. Even as proposed it's only running until 2030, but people will make irreversible life altering decisions based on it, I don't know, just doesn't seem nice to me.
I think humanity as a whole will do just fine: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/world-population-...
India isn't the developed world.
According to the UN, the world population is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100.
Despite the stagnant fertility rate, growth rate is still targeted in most countries at approx 3-4%, through immigration. I mention this because everyone has a higher environmental footprint in the developed world, through consumption.
Everyone wants a home, vehicle, gadgets, good food. If not everyone in the world can enjoy 1st world experiences without encroaching on the environment and destroying it at a catastrophic rate, then we're overpopulated. Meat consumption is already under scrutiny for land-use (particularly in Brazil) as though the problem isn't the growing demand for it, but the meat itself. When scaling up, everything destroys the environment.
Yes, I'm aware, which is why I included that the developing world's birth rate is also dropping, although starting from a higher baseline level.
> When scaling up, everything destroys the environment.
Yeah, I agree, but things don't tend to scale up linearly, and I think you're missing the cause/effect interplay between population growth and resource consumption. Yes, as populations grow they require more resources (as you point out), but limits on production of those same resources (eg food, energy) will in turn impose limits on population growth. Population growth isn't some uninhibited unstoppable force. Population shrinking forces also exist, which will likely make the net population rate of change hit an equilibrium.
Historically greater food and resource output could help you grow fast (particularly by intention), but for a long while now population growth is negatively correlated with production on the global scale. The 1st world is high production, the 3rd world is not, and all the while hunger and lack of infrastructure seems to be no deterrent to the fertility rate. Child mortality rate might also compel some to have more children.
If one were interested in stops on population growth, access to contraceptives and eliminating poverty would probably be the most powerful way short of a State policy to punish excess births.
I still don't see overpopulation as a serious future issue because much of the world is showing the same steady decline in birth rates to near or below population replacement levels.
next step is having more than 2 kids will wreck your credit score and this kid will be denied higher education. this is some text book china shit.
Sperate, but related: the latter contributes to the former.