AsiaCalling

Download This week the world reached a new population milestone- 7 billion people on earth.

To mark the occasion, the United Nations declared a child born in Philippines as the 7 billionth citizen of the world.

While in India the world’s second most populous nation a child rights group selected a girl born into a poor family in Uttar Pradesh as the 7 billionth baby.  

As Bismillah Geelani reports, the event has also brought a renewed focus to the country’s ever increasing population and the need to control it.

In rural Uttar Pradesh the birth of male child is celebrated with singing and dancing.

Today these villagers are defying the tradition for the first time.

They are celebrating the birth of baby girl called Nargis, born into a local farming family.

The group ‘Plan India International’ has declared her the World’s 7 billionth baby.

The group’s Executive Director is Bhagyashree Dengle.

“As child rights organization working on the issue of prevention of Female feticide, we thought it was an opportunity not just to celebrate the birth of 7 billionth child but to celibate a girl child.”

Nargis’s father Ajay is visibly overjoyed.

“I have been blessed with a daughter, that’s what I wanted. This is the happiest day of my life. Now I will make sure that she gets proper education. I want her to become a doctor.”

With help the sponsorship money from ‘Plan India International’ his dream may come true.

But what about the other 51 children born in India every minute.

Health Minister Gulam Nabi Azd says there is little to celebrate.

“At the moment 17 percent of the planet’s total population lives in India. This is a tremendous pressure on both resources land space and should concern us all. We have to do something to stabilize population growth because we can no longer afford a situation where our resources are being depleted but the population continues to increase.”

But many say it’s the misuse of resources that’s the real problem not the growing number of people.

Sunita Narain is Director of New Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment.

“If you look at the consumption of the richest in the world versus the poorest of the world it is very clear that the rich today are overusing and wasting the resources. We have definitely too many people on the roads but 90 percent of the road space is occupied by cars. Only 14 percent people travel by cars the rest still travel by bus. So if at all the birth of the seventh billionth baby must help us to remember is that its time we understood that the earth is finite, it has limited resources but that means that we learn to share better and we learn to  live within the resources.”

With a population of more than 1.2 billion India is currently the world’s second largest country.

But the United Nations predicts that India will surpass China as the most populous nation in less than two decades if its population continues to grow at the current rate.

In the 1970s, the government tried to address the situation with an aggressive birth control policy.

It required men with more than two children to be sterilized, often by force.

But most people didn’t like it and the then ruling Congress party was voted out office.

Another Family Planning Program based on incentives was launched in the 1990s. Cash rewards were given to people who used birth control. But it didn’t achieve much.

Some believe strict measures are again needed.

Najma Hetullah is a senior leader with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.

“We have lost a lot of time. We should have done it thirty years ago because the mathematical problem is once you multiply then you re-multiply and that is how populations grow fast. We should take it very seriously and whatever name you give to it birth control or anything else but there is no choice left to the country but to contain this population.”

But Sunita from the Centre for Science and Environment argues that coercive methods will never work.

She says the solution lies in eliminating poverty and empowering the women.

“The only way the world knows other than China’s forced sterilizations, the only successful time that people actually do birth control is when you have conditions where people don’t end up losing so many children at infant mortality, when people are secure in terms of their income in the future and when girls are literate and they are educated. Those are very clear, fundamental prerequisites for birth control.”