Punish the South with fewer Parliament seats for its success in social development?

Population stabilises because of social development, not state coercion. Should the South be penalised for the region's development success?

Punish the South for its social development success?

It’s social development, not differential degrees of success in population control measures, that is behind the uneven population growth between the South and the North. This simple fact seems to have been lost sight of, in the ongoing debate on the proposed delimitation of constituencies based on fresh census data, with the representatives of the southern states asking if they should be penalized for effectively implementing the national policies on population control.

It has long been a myth that the way to influence the rate of growth of the population is to implement population control measures, such as discouraging people from having more than two children, making available tools for contraception, such as birth control pills, intra-uterine devices, and condoms, and encouraging surgical procedures to make men and women incapable of reproduction, such as tying the fallopian tubes, in the case of women, and vasectomy, in the case of women.

All sorts of people have worried about the human population growing uncontrollably to unsustainable levels, resulting in famine, disease and dystopian tragedy. The archetypal population worrywart was, of course, Thomas Malthus, cleric and economist who was influential early 19th century onwards, and whose fears were summarized, simplistically, as follows: the rate of growth of human population would far outstrip the rate of growth of food production, leading to starvation, conflict and mayhem.

World population was approximately 600 million in 1700, 1 billion in 1800, 1.65 billion in 1900, 2 billion in 1928, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999, 7 billion in 2011, and 8 billion in 2023.

Improvement in living standards, the ability to control and treat disease, and reduce early deaths in infancy and childhood, led to rapid rise in population following the industrial and scientific revolutions. But thanks to techno-commercial advances in synthetic fertilisers, plant breeding and better crop management practices, even before genetically modified food came on the scene, humanity’s ability to produce food also accelerated apace. Food is now produced not only to feed humans but also to feed animals, so that humans can eat the animals and their produce. In several parts of the world, governments pay their farmers to refrain from producing food, so as not to lower food prices and hit the livelihoods of those who grow food.

But it is not just the increase in farm output that has averted the Malthusian disaster that worried large swathes of people in the 19th century. Humans stopped propagating themselves with the vigour they used to exhibit in the past. As incomes rose, life expectancy also rose, infant mortality and morbidity falling alongside. When larger and larger proportions of the population moved out of farming, the need for large families to toil on the farm declined. When the risk of children not growing up into adulthood fell, so did the urge to have many children. Family sizes shrank, whether in Protestant Germany, Britain, and the US , Catholic Spain, Islamic Iran or Buddhist Sri Lanka.

Yet, the observable fact of deceleration in the population growth rate did not prevent Christian fundamentalists and development theorists from propagating the imperative of robust population control measures, euphemistically termed family planning, in the developing world. Christian fundamentalists worried about the world’s heathens multiplying without restraint and overrunning the planet. The development professional worried that the increase in population would outstrip the pace of economic growth, so that per capita incomes and living standards would stagnate. Together they carried out sustained propaganda about the virtues of family planning.

The Chinese Communist Party fell for the propaganda and enforced a one-child policy. Confronted with a dwindling population, the Party now urges people to have two and even three children, but to little avail.

In the land of Advaita, the philosophy of unity or non-duality (of the creator and the creation), the quantitative norm for progeny became dual. Some states truncated the economic and political rights of those with more than two children, disqualifying them from certain jobs and eligibility to hold office in local governments.

All such norms proved redundant.

The total fertility rate is the number of children, on average, that a woman will have over her lifetime. Intuitively, if a woman has two children, who would replace her and her partner in reproduction, and neither more nor less, the population should remain stable. However, the TFR for a stable population is a shade higher than 2, because not all children would grow into reproductive adulthood. The TFR for population stability is estimated to be 2.1.

Studies have clearly established that what brings TFR down is social development, improvement in education, healthcare, incomes, and, in particular, women’s agency, and the control they acquire over their own lives. Education and earnings tend to improve a woman’s standing in the family and her ability to make autonomous life choices, whether and when to use contraception, and how many children to have.

It is in social development that the southern states far outstripped the Hindi belt. It is this that persuaded their populations to have fewer children. It is not the intensity of population propaganda but the degree of social development and, in particular, female agency, that the South forged ahead, leading to their populations stabilizing before the process got underway in the North.

Things have been improving on all these parameters across the world and across India, although unevenly. All the rich world has seen declining birth rates and total fertility rates below the replacement level.

For India as a whole, the TFR is now 2, below the replacement level. TFR is as high as 3 for Bihar, and 2.35 in Uttar Pradesh. Notably, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have brought their TFR to 2, as per the 2019-21 National Family Health Survey.

Surveys of social development now show broad convergence, and the Andhra region not spectacularly ahead of the average, but Northern states still lag the rest of the country.

Ending poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity had famously been determined to be the goals of Independent India. Should the states that made maximum progress in wiping the tears of the Daridranarayan, the poorest of the poor, benefitting whom Gandhi urged his followers to see as the talisman for assessing the merit or demerit of anything they do, be penalized for their relative success, by reducing their proportionate representation in Parliament?

If the proportion of parliamentary seats that the southern states currently have is retained, will that not amount to great injustice to the people of the North, whose share in Parliament would be lower than their share in the total population?

India is a Union of diverse states, with different languages, cultures and histories. If all Indians were uniformly alike, the principle of strict proportionality between the number of elected representatives and the represented would make perfect sense. But we already give some small regions, such as the Northeastern states, Goa and Laskhadweep a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats. This is because we accept that balancing the interests of our diverse polity is as important as equal representation for all citizens.

It is in this light that the Southern states’ demand to freeze the regional proportions of parliamentary seats, regardless of the latest population numbers, makes sense.