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Subject: [agathiyar] Population Issues - India and China
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Barbara Crossette of the New York Times writes about the population crisis
and related issues that China and India had to tackle. The article is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/091999population-review.html

If you are unable to read the article, you may be required to register
first. The registration is free (for now).

Now , some excerpts from the article:

--------- Excerpts begin ----------

Indians vote for their national leaders and enjoy free expression, but
democratic India has not delivered on its promise of a better life for most
Indians. Authoritarian China has done much better on that score. Nearly 83
percent of Chinese can read and write; only 53 percent of Indians are
literate, according to the United Nations (India says it's 64 percent), and
most of those who can read are men. China boasts a female primary school
enrollment of 99.9 percent; nearly a third of Indian girls are not in
school. More than half the children under five in India are malnourished and
underweight; in China the figure is 16 percent. About half the Indian
population lives on less than a dollar a day; fewer than 1 in 3 Chinese do.

Astonishingly for an open society, India also falls behind China in
communications. The Chinese have 56 telephone lines for every 1,000 people;
India has 19. There are 6 personal computers for every 1,000 Chinese and 2.1
for each 1,000 Indians. In economic terms, China's exports are more than
five times those of India.

Tavleen Singh, one of India's most acerbic political columnists, believes
that when political will is missing, nothing else works. She posed a few
questions to politicians recently in the newsmagazine India Today. "Would,
for instance, our political parties like to explain to us why the image of
the average Indian child, 50 years after Independence, is that of a scrawny,
spindle-legged, barefoot creature who ekes out an existence by begging at
traffic lights?" she wrote.

"And amid the shameful squalor that is most of India, would they like to
explain why our political leaders live in huge bungalows set in sprawling
gardens that we taxpayers pay for?"

She points to the absence of effective welfare and population policies, and
the persistence of the Hindu caste system, as causes for India's slide to
the social levels of sub-Saharan Africa. Indian socialism, on the wane in
any case, never had the strong welfare-state component found in Europe. Now,
as India adds more than 18 million people a year to its population, will
there be a demand for harsher measures for population control?

Ashish Bose, an Indian demographer, says no. "Our masses will not accept any
coercive method of family planning," he said. He, like many development
experts, says population control can in any case no longer be looked at in a
vacuum. What good is a family planning clinic, he asks, if no road goes
there?

General Suharto, the President deposed last year in Indonesia, opened condom
factories and encouraged "supermarket style" local family planning centers.
There were none of those grimy, unsanitary sterilization camps that are
often all that is available to the majority of rural Indian women, and no
harsh laws like those in China that prevent most families from having more
than one child.

"But what is important to mention is that while, yes, the Chinese Government
was autocratic, they were autocratic also in insisting that all children
should be in school and all people should have basic health care and all
people should have housing," Ms. Germaine said. The package improved the
lives of many Chinese, creating more support for the family planning program
than many outsiders would expect, some experts say.

"Chinese expanded freedoms of a different kind," Professor Sen argues,
adding that China's critics often do not recognize that educational
opportunity and universal health care liberate people to live longer, more
fulfilling lives.

Professor Sen also says that India has missed opportunities that might have
made its performance more comparable to China's. When lower fertility is
harnessed to democracy it creates a dynamo, he says -- and more so if
literacy and economic opportunities for women as well as basic health
services are added to the mix. He faults much of India, including liberal
economic thinkers, for not seeing these connections.

Mark Malloch Brown, the new administrator at the United Nations Development
Program, is on the side of patience. "India is changing," he said. "Its
sheer size means that there's a persistent rural backwater, where caste, a
lack of basic services, poverty, means that change is a hell of a lot slower
than we've all hoped. But I think we are arguing about speed rather than
final outcome.

"My point is to be a bit more agnostic about which policies work, about
final outcomes," he said. "Both countries -- India and China -- are going
through historical spasms on development issues. One made this extraordinary
human engineering intervention -- and if this was a hundred-yard sprint,
they've won. But you know, societies are a marathon, and it's just too soon
to be so declarative."

--------- Excerpts end ----------