Editorial
Prioritising demographic explosion issue
Ensure manpower quality, put lid on numbers
Despite development and other related issues taking centre stage, the concern over demographic explosion seems to have receded to the background. But the air of nonchalance notwithstanding, the population bomb is ticking away all the same as before.
Actually, the population control measures adopted in the past need to be reviewed in a fresh light to identify the flaws, avoid their repetition and take a new set of programmes for planned parenthood. Equipped with the advanced knowledge on people's reproductive health and the new innovations in medicine and technologies that go with it, we should move in a new direction.
Population growth, unless it is checked before it is too late, will have its negative impact on all the fronts of our endeavour to prosper. The runaway population growth has already begun to put pressure on the arable land for agriculture. The total amount of agricultural land has now come down from 9.0 million hectares in 1971 to 7.0 million hectares. And clearly, the lost land has gone into creating space for the expanded settlements for the rising population in the form of new urban centres, houses, roads, factories, you name them. At the same time, the urban population has been growing at a tremendous rate due mainly to city-ward migration of the rural people, who are adding to the number of slums already existing in the cities.. The irony is, the subhuman conditions under which the internal migrants live make a caricature of all our development efforts.
So, a renewed attention to the issue of population is an absolute imperative even for an effective development planning where utilisation of human resources is of prime importance.
But before adopting an effective human resource development planning, we need to know the present size of our population. Whatever figure on population we have now is an extrapolation based on the last population census carried out in 2001. That calls for holding a fresh population census soon. That is more so, because another decade is coming to a close at the end of the current year, as we have been holding census every tenth year.
With a precise knowledge of our present population and their distribution according to age, geography, sex and other criteria, it will be possible to take the next course of action for nation building.
To turn the growing number of unskilled population into an asset rather than a liability, the suggestion of a demographic expert made at a recent seminar on 'population explosion' in the city is worth noting. The idea was to concentrate on population management and shift part of the burden of human resource building from the education ministry to a separate authority suggested to be created for the purpose.
The need for a rethink of the old issue of demographic explosion, therefore, cannot be overemphasised. All future planning for the nation's socio-economic development must, therefore, hinge on our policy on population management.
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