COVER STORY/POPULATION

bills are merely a way to stress the need to formulate rules on reducing population.

Many states have already enacted penal provisions to control population, or to encourage smaller families. Just after Modi’s speech, the BJP-led Assam government decided to implement the Population and Women Empowerment Policy of Assam, passed more than two years ago. Under this, “no person having more than two children would be eligible for government jobs in Assam from January 2021”. Twelve states have similar provisions restricting access and eligibility conditional to two-child policies. It includes debarring people from contesting elections to Panchayati Raj institutions.

A debate on population is inevitable in a country that would surpass China’s, currently the most populous country. As per the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimates, India’s population will reach

1.5 billion by 2030 and hit

1.64 billion in 2050. China’s population will reach 1.46 billion by 2030. At present,

India hosts 16 per cent of the world’s population with only

2.45 per cent of the global surface area and 4 per cent of the water resources.

Globally too, the debate over population explosion has erupted after recent ecosystem assessments pointed to the role of human population in driving other species into extinction and precipitating a resource crunch. Biologist E O Wilson gives a scary estimate of three species being driven to extinction every hour. In the planet’s natural course, the rate of extinction is one per million species per year. It is now well known that humans are the driving force behind what is regarded as the sixth mass extinction.