All that glitters is not gold. Review on India Shining Commercial 2004

I love India - and it pleases me no end when an Infosys or a Wipro makes it to the billion-dollar club.

However, one needs to look beyond the slick adverts and try to sum up the good and bad - to truly understand how well the country is doing. I'll deal with my views with some disjointed sentences below. Disjointed for the purpose of brevity.

Economically, in the cities, the country is doing well in patches. Job prospects are brighter and some of them are well paying ones. The ones accessing the Internet invariably belong to this class. For them, India is Shining.

The country's growth rate this year was good - but this growth rate was achieved because of good monsoons. On this front, successive govts. have done little to reduce the dependence of farmers on the monsoons. Our growth rate will again go down the year rain gods decide to take a vacation - dulling the shine a bit.

Corruption levels in India have reached phenomenal levels. It is no longer possible to get anything done anymore w/o greasing the palms. Govt. workers now will brazenly come to your house to deliver the documents and take their cut - documents you were entitled to when you went asking for them the first time. Even the courts now work through bribes. One can get everything from a challan against the president of India to a marriage certificate - simply by paying a few thousand to those who are supposed to be upholding the law. The justice system ultimately is the foundation of democracy. With the corruption of the court system, India's democracy rests on rather creaky foundations. Now I begin to wonder - where is the shine?

The population growth shows no sign of slowing down. This is a ticking time bomb. It took us 25 years to double from 500 million to a billion. An increase of 500 million Indians. This increase of 500 million could be supported primarily through increased food yield - primarily from green revolution. However, it is now quite clear, that there is a limit to the increased yields possible. For example, test plants with higher yields can no longer support the weight of grains and collapse when grown in fields. Try to make their stems sturdier - and the yield goes down. A given leaf area can only capture so much sunlight for photosynthesis. There is now little or no advance in terms of increased crop yields. My next point needs to be considered in this context.

It seems that our population growth rates have changed very little over the last couple of decades. If it took us 25 years to double, it logically follows that it will take us another 25 years to double again. Laloo Yadav had more than half a dozen children - and his children I can bet will have more than a dozen progenies.

Unfortunately, this time, a doubling of population(something that is'scheduled' to happen within our lifetime), will mean an increase of 1 billion instead of the earlier increase of 500 million. We are already a billion - can you imagine another billion in the same space, sharing the same resources? And we are as close as the year 2025 from proclaiming that the 2 billionth Indian was born. One wonders what the'India Shining' ads will look then?

In ecology there is a concept called'Carrying Capacity'. A simple analogy is that of a balloon. One can inflate a balloon to a certain level. It may be possible to double its size by pumping in more air. The balloon will be stressed, but it will not burst. Pump in more air, and the balloon bursts. Exactly the same phenomenon happens in all biological systems - from bacteria to mice to fishes. One can grow a certain number of bacteria in a given volume of culture media. Once this is past saturation, bacteria will start dying off - even if there are plenty of nutrients in the growth media left over.

It is difficult to say what the carrying capacity of a given land mass like India might be with regard to the number of humans it can support. Technological advances(like the green revolution) can increase this capacity. Unfortunately, technology can only go so far. At some point, the'balloon' will burst - with disastrous consequences. Essentially, a distressed environment leads to reduced yields, this leads to even greater demands - distressing the environment even further - a vicious cycle thus ensues. Crossing the Rubicon of'carrying capacity' does not just have consequences just for the environment - it will also manifest itself in the social, political and cultural milieu of a population.

Some signs of trouble are already showing up. Cities are getting to be over-crowded and polluted. Many streams and rivers smell so bad from pollution that one has to hold ones noses when passing them. In many villages - that never had a problem with water, inhabitants now have to drink the arsenic flavored type. One can no longer depend of municipal water supply in large sections of most cities.

Dwellers dig tube-wells for water - and when that runs dry, have to dig a deeper well. How deep do you want to dig tomorrow? Housing is getting to be more and more problematic. Competition for resources has gone up - so that bribes, nepotism, and corrupt practices flourish. Slowly, the quality of life that we might have enjoyed two decades back is now sliding back and this process is accelerating. Wildlife such as birds are now already seeing alarming drops in their population. You will no longer find vultures feasting on a dead carcass. Streams that spawned fishes now run dry.

India has a dull shine today - question is - is it a mirage that will not hold up to the future?

You decide - and let me know what you think.

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Note: Some have made the argument that certain countries(like Japan) support far greater numbers of individuals per square kilometer. One should not forget that these countries are also technologically far far more sophisticated and consequently have much greater carrying capacity. Japan can afford to import resources to essentially augment its'Carrying Capacity'. In addition, when looking at a small country, one is no longer dealing with a large population like India's. The two countries are very different and should not be compared.