In the late 19th century, the British biologist Francis Galton came up with a new field of population studies called eugenics (literally meaning “good birth”). Drawing on the work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin, Galton argued that the human race could be improved by encouraging the fittest members to have more children.
The eugenics movement spread across the West in the early part of the 20th century, with the focus gradually shifting from promoting desirable traits to removing undesirable traits.
In the US, this took the form of population control for minority groups (including forced sterilisations for African-Americans and native Americans). The movement took an even more horrific turn in Germany, with concentration camps designed to segregate, and eventually kill, those deemed undesirable by the Nazis.
The association with Nazism proved to be a death knell for eugenics. But the population control movement survived. In the post-War years, global concerns about food insecurity and environmental degradation stirred a new paranoia about population growth. The “undesirable” elements of the human race were now located in the Third World, rather than in the West.
The ideas of an 18th century economist and clergyman were used to drum up support for population control campaigns. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, Robert Thomas Malthus had warned that population growth would soon outstrip global food supply. The Industrial Revolution proved Malthus wrong. It raised productivity across all spheres of the economy, including agriculture.
Undeterred by the historical record, neo-Malthusians of the mid-20th century revived fears of an impending food crisis. Back in the day, Reverend Malthus had favoured sexual abstinence to limit population growth. In a concession to modernity, neo-Malthusians recommended the use of contraceptives.
Some neo-Malthusians such as the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Ehrlich went further, advocating a “series of financial rewards and penalties designed to discourage reproduction”. In his widely-cited 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich painted a vivid picture of the overflowing streets of Delhi to convey the urgency of defusing the ticking “population bomb”. The teeming millions of India and China became the new targets of population control, replacing African-Americans and the Jews. UN agencies and American philanthropic foundations helped spread the new gospel of population control.
Governments in developing countries such as India and China jumped aboard the population control bandwagon. Weak economic growth and high population growth had led to anaemic per capita income growth in these countries. Policymakers felt it offered a way to raise incomes per head and lower the strain on government finances at the same time.
The population control drive took a coercive turn with China implementing the one-child policy in the late 1970s. Under the cover of the Emergency, India undertook forced sterilisations. The allocation of Lok Sabha seats across states was frozen to penalise states with high birth rates (through the 42nd amendment in 1976).
When the United Nations Population Fund launched the Population Award in 1983, the first winners were the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Chinese family planning commission chief Qian Xinzhong.
Economists and demographers remain divided on the effectiveness of the population control strategy. Total fertility rates (or births per woman) have been declining in India and China (and in many large developing countries) since the 1960s, well before the population control campaign reached its peak.
Socio-economic changes such as rising enrollment of women in educational institutions, declining child mortality rates, and falling poverty may have impacted fertility rates more than State-funded “family planning” programmes.
The faster-than-anticipated decline in fertility rates has stirred new fears about “depopulation”. For many years, UN projections had suggested that the global population would keep growing throughout the 21st century. But in 2022, it made a sharp revision, indicating that the global population would peak in the 2080s, and decline after that.
Some demographers and economists believe that governments should now encourage people to have more children. A depopulating world may not necessarily be good for either the environment or economic growth, they argue. The rising share of the elderly might precipitate fiscal crises around the world, and slow down growth. The declining share of youth would slow down innovation, and inhibit humanity’s ability to fight the climate crisis, they fear.
While these concerns may be justified, it is not entirely clear what the policy response should be. We still don’t know why the pace of decline in fertility rates varies across regions with similar socioeconomic characteristics. Or what has caused the uptick in fertility rates among better educated women in several high-income regions.
For more than a century, the world has witnessed numerous misguided attempts to control population growth, motivated by paranoia and bigotry. We need to avoid further misadventures in the name of population stabilisation.
We need more careful and multi-disciplinary research to understand the drivers of demographic changes in different parts of the world. Radical policy prescriptions based on limited knowledge will not help the world.
Pramit Bhattacharya is a Bengaluru-based journalist. The views expressed are personal
