India’s survival — There is another curve to flatten!
GP
I woke up from my afternoon nap on this cold and lazy Saturday. With the world locked up pretty much there is not a whole lot to do but the thoughts of Spanish Flu of 1918 began swirling in my mind. I started wondering how our great grandparents dealt with it back then. Births and deaths were never recorded in India to the needed detail and it is hard to know with certainty of how many would have died of Spanish Flu just a century ago. The guesstimate is, it is anywhere between 4 to 6 pct of the population. India as a country lost the most during this pandemic. In today’s terms that turns out to be the population of Andhra Pradesh and more or less all of Telangana. If Covid-19 were to become as bad as Spanish Flu the country would collapse. Even the British Raj who were not answerable to anyone struggled with the volume of death Spanish Flu brought in. Democratic governments cannot survive dealing with such an outcome!
For our generation who were born in the later half of 1960s all our schooling happened in the 70s. Just little over 50 years back we had lost 4 to 6 percent of our population and there was not a word mentioned on this pandemic anywhere in our school curriculum. How sad it is that we were never taught such an important part of our history! I read somewhere that even Gandhi had an attack of Spanish Flu and thankfully he survived! Our curriculum developers need a rethink on this. Ask any European and they will talk about Black Death of the medieval times where they lost up to 30% of their population. I guess plague depopulated India too in a big way. There may have been an odd reference to it in our school curriculum but don’t remember studying anything exhaustive about it.
Again back to Spanish Flu, the percentage of death was the highest among women and the weaker sections of the society. The general nutritional intake was poor among these groups and had weaker immunity and they were susceptible to the worse effects of the flu. We do not know how Coronavirus will play out in India. It is still early and the nation is doing its best to flatten the curve. However, so far with the lock down the people that are suffering the most again are the weaker sections of the society. Till around the year 2000 I have never heard of any migrant labor in South India. Today even in the remote drought prone villages of Chittoor district you will find people all the way from the Ganges belt for a mere 300 rupees of daily wage! Typically a young man in his 20s or early 30s have to eke a living out of this 300 rupees and also send some back to the family in his hometown. The Ganges belt has one of the most fertile lands on the face of the earth. It has sustained civilizations for eons. However, today it cannot provide enough to feed two square meals to its own. There is indeed a simple reason and it is to do with biocapacity deficit!
When the population grows beyond the biocapacity of the land then excess population will have to find ways to make a living and this leads to mass migration. That is indeed what is happening in the Ganges belt. The population is still growing at an alarming 2% and the doubling rate is just 36 years. This is a human disaster in the making. Rest of the country, even the supposed affluent portions are not too far. They are draining the underground aquifers at a rate where it will all be dry in near future. This will reduce the biocapacity of the land in a major way. The warning signs are all there for the past two decades. However, we as a nation are turning a blind eye. It is all about today and there is hardly a concern of how tomorrow is going to be. There is only one way for us to sustain as a nation and that is to depopulate. We need to flatten this growth curve. As per 1921 census the population of India was 25 crores (250 mil). Strangely it had decreased from 1911 census. So it is not unheard of that we had contracted in terms of population. Many a times the question arises of why there were massive famines in the history of India even when the population was low. If you research these famines you will understand that most of them were a result of wholesome crop failures. I remember my grandfather telling me of how the rice crop grows close to 2 feet and would produce no grain at all. We have overcome many of these challenges with technology. The current sustainability challenges are very profound with no easy answers!
Today in the middle of a worldwide pandemic we know that the poor and the malnourished suffer the most. However, there is also the lurking potential to disrupt societies in a dramatic way where it impacts every citizen. It may even lead to sudden collapse of societies and way of life! April 22nd is marked as Earth Day and it is not too far from now. My good friend Navneet reminds me from time to time that Mother Earth knows how to take care of itself. If we continue to abuse Mother Earth it can depopulate humans in ways unimaginable. For us to survive as a species there is no other way than to flatten the population growth curve!