Life is indeed a difficult business. Just when you get to the answer, it changes the question! …And that is, as any true-blue Indian would tell you, absolutely unfair. We are the sticklers of the syllabus. So, while you are presently navigating the very difficult business of living a human life, this business of giving life and that too in more numbers, is a question outside the syllabus! We, the Indian kids of the 70s, (yeah, the same who would take nothing lying down and then bend surreptitiously to pick it up), grew up with a settled understanding that our country is huge and very huge when it comes to population. We were growing at a very rapid rate and that was because our parents had a lot of children. Mine had three. I found myself carelessly tucked in the middle. But often listening to the happiness mantra - ‘Hum do, hamare do,’ me and my eldest sibling most odiously called our little sister – ‘extra’. Growing up as an Indian, the one thing that we got to see all around us was plenty of people. In school, when we came across idioms like ‘two is company, three is crowd,’ we quickly discarded it as British opulence. Three, a crowd? By Indian standards, crowds came in hundreds.

 

 

 

Anything less than that were just people. It was when I started watching foreign films that I found, to my dire amazement, that home could be huge with just one person living in it; streets could be so less occupied, and buses need not be so full of people so as to dangle sideways. Growing up, we heard stories of a bygone time when there were camps actually to execute a sterilisation drive - in humans! In short -- a lot of good and bad measures were taken by governments, different organisations and aware citizens to tell other Indians that more children were less desirable. So, when a clarion call comes from most unlikely quarters of a need to mother/father 3 children, people’s incredulity is quite understandable. Did we not just cross China - not in manufacturing goods, but in increasing population - to become the world's most populous country? Records say that India accommodates over 17 percent of world’s population in just 2.4 pc of land. Nowhere in the world is population density so dense. Never mind what the records say…it is so damn visible. Streets, roads and highways in India do not get flooded by people, they get flooded by seas of people. We live in a perpetual state of rush hours.

 

No one can pray harder than an Indian to get a parking space in commercial areas. It is only due to the deft maneuvering of our driving skills that we survive another day in Indian streets. In other countries, money, power and connections, when employed in full measures, surely hide one or other crime. In India, you need these to get your kid admitted to school. Your saga won’t end here naturally as your kid would go to college and would need a job so on and so forth. The real massiveness of the size of India’s population comes in full public view every time there is a government advertisement for jobs. There and many more recorded and unrecorded, measured and experienced facts that have contributed to a general understanding that we are too many.

 

We need to bring this ‘tooooo many’ down at least within the permissible limit of ‘very many’. So, when I first heard about the decline in the Indian population, like any good, semi-intelligent Indian, I thought ‘Der aaye, durust aaye.’ Alas!, ‘durust nahi aaye!’ Much before RSS Sarsanghachalak Dr Mohan Bhagwat raised the red flags, experts on the matter were already trying to highlight the dangers of self-imposed ‘one or two-child policy’ of parents. They say it has brought about a sharp decline in our population. Birth rates are falling below the desired levels. (…And we thought that exactly was the national ask from us!) Now I know why most passionate people hate statistics. It brings everything to a naught. So, now 3 kids it is. Is it!!???! This is confusing to say the least. So, you see our parents had three kids and our children can have three kids while we continue to suffer this self-imposed one-child policy. I know three kids means a lot of noise but they can be far better than one kid thinking that the entire purpose of parents’ existence is to comfort him/her. With 3, you as parents can at least have a voice. These single ‘apple-of-your-eyes’ do not give parents even a chance to blink.

 

When we were 3, sibling rivalry assured that the parents got their due attention too. I do understand that at the national level, harried parents and their petty complaints carry little weight. India’s great strides have taught us to dream big and think ahead. Looking ahead, we would of course not want only some oldies waving flags and resolving to build a great nation when we reach the fag end of the ‘Amritkaal.’ Point taken. But here I think it is my duty to bring some home truths to light. How-so-ever we may claim that our self-imposed one-two child policy was keeping in mind the nation's interest, it actually was a more self-serving one. The main problem with kids is not having them but raising them. Thanks to our education system (and its many price caps), it leaves little room for any maneuvering of the house-hold budgets to accommodate more kids. Education, these days, is no more something which you willingly picked up while living a full life, growing up with friends. Present day education needs life-long savings. More than two kids are just unaffordable. Having 3 kids would require a greater GDP and lesser GST. And Sir, if you fear that a depleting population will lead to society perishing on its own, may I very humbly tell you that our education system is already on the job. Look at the marvels coming out of it!

 

They are useless at home and unemployable outside, these apples of our eyes! In conclusion Sir, I most humbly submit to you, to please consider all these factors. Sir, for now, we desperately need policies that further qualitative improvement of our human resource. Quantity is just a game of numbers. Giving our absolutely unbiased dedication to our kids, I am sure most Indians will be too happy to oblige, if only things are made easier for them - meaning better education at much lesser price. There is an Indianised version of an old English adage which says… ‘1000 Kauravas, do not 5 Pandavas make.’ Sir, you are considered the think-tank that fuels Government policy-making. Don’t let our hopes of building a great nation tank by letting the government take its eyes off the real issues. Let’s raise the bar, numbers would follow. n