India: Population change and its consequences

tellectual consensus on dirigiste trade and development policies; the sec-ond, the view that India’s age-old poverty was due to over-population. These repudiated views on which I was brought up in the early 1960s at Oxford. I know the first of these works of revisionism has had some effect in chang-ing perceptions on the appropriateness of “outward-looking ” policies for development. But I had not realized the once heretical view that the “popu-lation problem ” is not a problem (except in the very short run, and only if appropriate policies are not in place) is also now very much the consensus view (see Kelley 2001). My late friend Julian Simon, who was universally reviled by mainstream economists for his view that a large population is a country’s ultimate resource, is now seen to have been proved right by a burgeoning body of research. During the mid-1970s to mid-1980s I was also associated with the World Bank’s research establishment. The sheaf of old memos in my files from those days demonstrates how entrenched was the old dirigiste consensus in an institution that is now seen as having been in the vanguard of the new revisionist consensus on population and devel-opment.2 So, returning in this essay to the issues discussed in the first edi-tion of The Hindu Equilibrium, I feel rather like the old lady who went to see King Lear and found it full of quotations! I will first review what is now known of the economic effects of popu-lation growth over the last century in India, including the emerging con-cerns that have been expressed by the environmental movement and why their attempts to legislate their “habits of the heart ” pose real dangers for the welfare of the poor in India.3 I then examine the social and political consequences of this population growth