Weakness Of Population Growth

India's Growing Population- Our Strength or Weakness?

By Florine Roche

Come another World Population Day and it is time for introducing a slew of family welfare programmes for the government in order to improve the quality of human resource and also to put breaks on the rapid growth of our population to some extent. But all these measures have failed to yield desired results or the results have been insignificant as compared to the growth we have been witnessing. The reasons for this are varied ranging democratic compulsions to political expediency on the part of the government and our own languid response to a pressing issue like unhindered population growth.

Now there is an assuring argument doing the rounds that we need not lose sleep over

There are people who still believed children are gift of god and fail to realize that more mouths to feed means a sizeable section of our society is deprived of even basic necessities. The quality of our undernourished, poverty stricken, unhealthy, uneducated population will be nothing as compared to those where quality of life in terms of food, shelter, clothing housing, health-care, economic security, old-age care and standard of living is much higher and superior.

Needless to say the productivity of such a population would be much higher than those where the people have to struggle on a daily basis for getting even the basic needs. While countries like China and Japan have taken firm steps to reverse the trend of population growth India is taking it easy thinking that its 1.2 billion population is its asset or strength. But the truth is quite farther from this. We need to take drastic measures and resolutely try to improve the quality of our population to convert it into quality human resource. Or else all our efforts will go down in the

A huge population makes efficient management a burdensome task and everything goes beyond our control.

Every year July 11 is observed as World Population Day. The major intention of celebrating this day is to create awareness on issues pertaining to global population. The world population has crossed 7.025 billion in May this year and it has taken just 24 years for the population to grow from a mere 5 billion in 1987 to more than 7 billion in two decades. India is all set to overtake China (only in numbers) by 2030 but we cannot say the same with the quality.

Procreation is our right but it is not enough just to multiply in number. What we e need to consider is not what the large population of our country has done so far but what kind of population we are becoming of now. We definitely need to strike a healthy balance between quantity and