Re: [IAC#RG] New List guidelines / rules

I believe the population of India is slowing naturally. While we are a large and growing country, we are currently (with this census) ahead of our population control goals/estimates.

I believe that deliberate interventions that risk drops in populations will be devastating for the country in terms of economic as well as humanitarian costs. For example, we are currently at the highest youth population ever and slowing. If this slow down is drastic, this massive youth population will be an aging population with insufficient younger people to provide care/finances. With our country's poverty profile (which shows increasing inequality), this will be a humanitarian disaster. With rising inequality, most of the population of the future is likely to be poor (since we aren't doing anything to fix it) How is a large poor population to function with fewer earners than dependents?

I am of the belief that our naturally reducing population will take us into a more controlled reduction of population. I also believe that we need to open our eyes beyond the blinkers of politics and religion and understand that there are strong corelations between poverty and number of children (which also make sense from a survival PoV - four poor kids can care for aging parents better than one poor kid - as well as the question of worse survival to adulthood rates among poor). These areas of heavy growth can be addressed with human development - education, health, work, decreasing economic inequality+inflation.

In my view, it is important that we learn to see our population as an asset rather than nurture unconscious genocide fantasies that keep manifesting as strategies to reduce number of people. Getting rid of people will not help manage the ones that remain. The need is to manage the ones that remain so that people perceive less need for more offspring... and we don't end up with a large aged population that is mostly abandoned.

Hope that makes sense.

Vidyut