With all this in mind, it really feels sad to say that a good proportion of India's population lives below poverty line i.e. they don't even have a means to fulfill the basic needs of life i.e. food and shelter. The condition of roads and public infrastructure in our country is among st the worst in the world. The crimes such as dowry deaths, child labor and honor killings still make the top headlines. The projection that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and future of the world lies in the east and not in the west still look ages apart.
With all said and done, what could be the possible reason for this condition of our country? Is it because of the corrupt politics which seems to be an easy target and on which everyone seems to shed the blame very easily. Is it the attitude of common people who is only bothered about his family and does not give a shit about his neighbor, forget thinking about the country. The real question is have we at least identified the reason for this mess, so that we can start thinking about what it takes to resolve it. Is the reason identified or are we all just busy in blaming our politicians for creating this mess in our country like we blame our neighbors of creating a mess in our neighborhood? What we don't realize is that the politician is also one of us. Even if we have all the politicians as honest, things still won't improve much because people will still remain dishonest and corrupt. The society gets the same leaders as the society itself is.
Let me share a few facts here. India is the second most populous country in the world with over a billion plus population. India's economy is still way way behind the biggest economies in the world i.e. USA, China and Japan. Also, if we talk about the US, it has 3 times the area in terms of land as compared to India. The US population is less than 1/4 th of India's population. This simply means that even if both US and India have the same economies, still an individual in the US has 12 times more resources as compared to in India. Now let us talk about the difference in economies. The size of US economy is approx 9 times that of India. That means on an average, the amount of resources (in terms of wealth, land, food etc.) that an individual has in the US is 12 x 9 = 108 times as compared to India. That would also mean that the standard of living of an individual in the US is 108 times as compared to an average Indian. Even if some wonder happens and we become the largest economy in the world (which in itself is a rare possibility), we can never have the same standard of living or wealth as people currently have in the US, simply because of our population.
There are 3 main factors that we are discussing here in the above comparison. Land, economy and population. Land is something about which we can't do anything about. The land that we have will obviously remain the same and its not going to increase unless we invade some country in our neighborhood which of course is not going to happen. Economy is something on which we can work our way through assuming that our economic growth is definitely improving over the years, so we can be optimistic about it. It is the 3rd point that I am most concerned about i.e. population of India. Does it take a lot of mathematics to figure out that it is because of our billion plus population that we have such poor standard of living. The biggest irony in our country is that no one is bothered about our rising population. US and the Europe have very strict immigration measures in place and with time passing by they are making it even more stringent. China even though having much more area as compared to India is very determined to make sure that they have a close check on the Chinese population by introducing policies like 1 child in a family etc. Why don't we have any such measure in place? Why don't we see population control as the biggest agenda of all political parties? Why are we just sitting and waiting for the disaster to happen? When we say our economy is growing at 8% year on year, why are we not taking into account the population growth rate? Is it so difficult to understand that every individual born will need bare minimum resources to survive? Why we don't even care about the fact that there are poorer nations than India as well in this world and people from those nations migrate to India. Why are there no strict measures to restrict the illegal immigration that happens across our borders from countries like Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal and Pakistan.? Do we even have a mechanism or a way to figure out if an individual is an Indian or not? How many people in our countries have valid passports? Why is the inflation so much in our country despite the fact that the commodities are already damn expensive? Isn't it because we have so many people in our country that the demand always remains high which in turn drives the price of a commodity.
The answer to all the questions above lies in one common area, India's billion plus population. It is not late when we will become the most populous country in the world with so little resources to serve.
These are a few questions which are going on in my mind and I wanted to share so that everyone should at least think about them. I am not saying that I have a definitive solution to this problem. Just wanted people to at least focus on the real problem instead of being occupied with cheap cast, religion based political agendas.
