Book Review on Imagining India Essay

Monday morning, it is chaos. notwithstanding its pristine new metro and expanding high modes, the city can barely retain the morning hubbub, the swarm of wad all trying to get roundwhere. By the time I r from each one Kaushik Basus homeset a little apart from the highway, on a quiet street that is give up except for a single, lazy cow who stops in former of the car, in no hurry to moveI am truly late, a little grimy, unless exhilarated. Kaushik and I chat about how the crowds in the city look completely different compared to, say, two decades ago. Then, you would see populate lounging near tea shops, reading the morning paper late into the afternoon, puffing languorously at their beedis and generally shooting the breeze. still as India has changed bursting frontward as one of the worlds fastest- prepareing countriesso has the eyeshot on the street.And as Kaushik points out, it is this new restlessness, the hum and thrum of its concourse, that is the sound of Indias fr ugalal engine today. Kaushik is the author of a number of books on India and teaches economics at Cornell, and his take on Indias developmentof a unsophisticated driven by human enormous(p)is now well accepted. Indias spot as the worlds go-to destination for talent is hardly surprise we may suck up been short on variant things at various times, but we have always had plenty of people. The crowded tumult of our cities is something I experience e real day as I navigate my way to our Bangalore office through a dense crowd that overflows from the foot cuts and on to the passageof software engineers waiting at bus stops, groups of women in colourful saris, on their way to their jobs 38 at the garment factories that line the road, men in construction hats heading towards the semi-completed highway. And then on that point are the people move a twist the cars, hawking magazines and pirated versions of the latest best-sellers.* Looking around, I think that if people are the engine of Indias ripening, our economy has only just begun to rev up up. But to the demo graphic experts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Indias commonwealth make the country quite simply a disaster of epic proportions. capital of Minnesota Ehlrichs visit to Delhi in 1966 forms the opening of his book The state Bomb, and his cut as he describes Indias crowds is palpable People eating, people washing, people sleeping . . . people visiting, arguing and screaming . . . people clinging to buses . . . people, people, people. But in the stand two decades, this depressing vision of Indias population as an overwhelming burden has been turned on its head. With growth, our human capital has emerged as a vibrant source of workers and consumers not just for India, but also for the global economy.But this change in our attitudes has not uprise easily. Since independence, India struggled for decades with policies that tried to put the lid on its surging population. It is only late that the country has been able to look its billion in the eye and rate its advantages. MILLIONS ON AN ANTHILL For or so of the twentieth century, people some(prenominal) in spite of appearance and outside India viewed us through a lens that was distinctly Malthusian. As a poor and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate doubting Thomas Malthuss uniquely despondent visionthat great population growth inevitably led to great famine and desp bloodline.The time that Thomas Malthus, writer, amateur economist and clergyman (the enduring term history gave him would be the inconsolable parson), lived in may have greatly influenced his theory on population. Nineteenth-century England was seeing very high birth rates, with families having children by the bakers dozen. Malthus who, as the second of eight children, was himself part of the population explosion he bemoanedpredicted in his An Essay on *Tbe Alchemist, Liars Poker and (Tom Friedman would be delighted) The World Is Flat have been perennial favourites for Indian pirates.the Principle of Population that the unprecedented increases in population would lead to a cycle of famines, of epidemics, and unhealthy seasons. India in particular seemed to be speedily bearing down the path that Malthus predicted. On our shores, famine was a regular visitor. We endured thirty hunger famines* surrounded by 1770 and 1950 plagues during which entire provinces saw a third of their population disappear, and the countryside was covered with the faded bones of the millions dead.1 By the mid twentieth century, neo-Malthusian prophets were sounding the discouragement on the disastrous population growth in India and China, and predicted that the impact of such growth would be felt around the world. Their apocalyptic scenarios helped justify Draconian approaches to birth obtain. Policies recommending sterilization of the unfit and the disabled, and the killing of defective babies gained the air of respectabl e theory.2 Indias increasing dependence on diet aid from the developed world due to domestic shortages also fuelled the fear around its population growthin 1960 India had consumed one-eighth of the United States fare wheat production, and by 1966 this had grown to onefourth. Consequently, if you were an adult in the 1950s and sixties and followed the news, it was entirely plausible to believe that the endgame for humanity was just round the corner you may also have believed that this catastrophe was the making of some overly fecund Indians. Nehru, observing the hand-wringing, remarked that the Western world was getting panicked at the prospect of the masses of Asia becoming vaster and vaster, and swarming all over the bewilder.And it is true that Indians of this generation had a cultural affinity for big families, tied(p) among the middle classevery long holiday during my childhood was exhausted at my grandparents house with my cousins, and a family photo from that time has a atomic number 6 people crammed into the frame. Indian families were big enough to be your *Amartya Sen and others have pointed out, however, that succession these famines may have seemed to be the consequence of a country that was both poor and overpopulated, they were in fact triggered partly by trade policies and the drop of infrastructure. Lord Lytton exported wheat from India at the height of the 1876-78 famine, and the lack of connectivity across the country affected transportation of grain to affected areas.Main social rankmost people did not mingle extensively outside family weddings, celebrations and visits to each others homes. The growing global worries around our population growth created immense pressure on India to impose some sort of control on our birth rates, and we became the first developing country to initiate a family proviso programme. But our early family planning policies had an unusual emphasis on self-control.3 In part this was influenced by leaders s uch as Gandhi, who preached abstinence in an interesting departure from his usual policy of non-violence, he had said, Wives should fight off their husbands with force, if necessary.This condense on abstinence and self-restraint go on with independent Indias first health curate, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who was in the odd panorama of being at the helm of a family planning programme age opposing family planning in principle.4 As a case Indian policy during this decade emphasized the rhythm method. Rural India was targeted for raising awareness of the method, and one villager remarked of its success, They talked of the rhythm method to people who didnt cognize the calendar. Then they gave us rosaries of coloured beads . . . at night, people couldnt tell the red bead for dont from the green for go ahead. 5 Not surprisingly, Indias population continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s, as fertility remained stubbornly high in time while infant mortality and death rates fell rap idly.This was patronage the massive awareness-building efforts around family planning that the government undertook. I still call the undersized family songs on the radio and the walls of our cities, the sides of buses and trucks were papered with posters that featured happy (and small) cartoon families, and slogans the like Us Two, Ours Two. And yet, each census release made it separate that our population numbers continued to relentlessly soar, and we despaired over a graph that was climbing too high, too fast. SNIP, SNIP As the global panic around population growth surged, the Indian and Chinese governments began executing white-knuckle measures of family planning in the 1960s. Our house is on fire, Dr S. Chandrasekhar, minister of health and family planning, said in 1968. If we focused to a greater extent on sterilization, he added, We can get the cremate under control.By the 1970s, programmes and targets for sterilization of citizens were set up for Indian states. in that respect was dismantle a vasectomy clinic set up at the Victoria address rail station in Bombay, to cater to the passenger traffic slick through. 7 But no matter how Indian governments tried to leaven sterilization with incentives and sops, the number of people willing to undergo the procedure did not go up. Indias poor wanted childrenand especially sonsas economic security. State efforts to persuade citizens into sterilization backfired in unexpected waysas when many people across rural India refused to have the anti-tuberculosis BCG, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, injections because of a rumour that BCG stood for birth control government.8 In 1975, however, Indira Gandhi announced the Emergency, which hang democratic rights and elections and endowed her with new powers of persuasion, so to speak.The Indian government morphed into a frighteningly sycophantic group, there to do the bidding of the prime minister and her son Sanjaythe same hotheaded young man who had described the fo otlocker ministers as ignorant buffoons, thought his mother a ditherer and regarded the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos his enjoyment model.9 In the winter of 1976, I, along with some of my fellow IIT Bombay savants, had arrived on the fiesta circuit in Delhi to participate in the student debates and quizzes (yes, I was an chronically nerd). It meant going from college to college for competitions, from Hindu to St Stephens to Miranda House to IIT Delhi. Most of us from the sylvan, privy campus of IIT Bombay were not as politically aware as the Delhi studentsthe only elections we followed were those for the ITT hostels and student body. But in the Delhi of the Emergency years, sitting around campfires, one comprehend the whispered tales of Emergency-era atrocities, and of one particular outragenasbandi.Sanjay, who had discovered a penchant and talent for authoritarianism with the Emergency, had made sterilizationspecifically male sterilization or nasbandi his pet project . The sterilization measures that were introduced came to be known as the Sanjay military issuea combination, as the demographer Ashish Bose put it to me, of coercion, cruelty, corruption and cooked figures. Ashish notes that incentives to undergo the sterilization procedure included laws that required a sterilization certificate onwards government permits and rural credit could be granted. Children of parents with more(prenominal) than three children establish that schools refused them admission, and prisoners did not get parole until they went under the knife. And some government departments persuaded their more reluctant employees to undergo the procedure by threatening them with charges of embezzlement.* The steep sterilization targets for state governments meant that people were often rounded up like sheep and taken to family planning clinics. For instance, one journalist witnessed municipal police in the small town of Barsi, Maharashtra, dragging several hundred peasants visiting Barsi on merchandise day off the streets.They drove these men in two refuse trucks to the local family planning clinic, where beefy orderlies held them down while they were given vasectomies.10 This scene repeated itself time and again, across the country. It was difficult to trust the sterlization figures the government released since there was so often pressure on the states for results. Nevertheless, the Emergency-era sterilization programme, Ashish notes, may have achieved nearly two-thirds of its targeteight million sterilizations. But democracy before long hit back with a stunning blow. When Indira Gandhi called for elections in 1977ignoring Sanjays protests, much to his ire11the Congress was immediately tossed out of power. The nasbandi programme was the last gasp of coercive family planning in India on a large scale, and it became political suicide to implement similar policies.The Janata Party government that followed Indira even changed the label of the progra mme to avoid the stigma it carried, and family planning became family welfare. spell sterilization programmes have occasionally reappeared across states, they have been mostly voluntary, with the focus on incentives to undergo the procedure, f *Asoka Bandarage describes the target fever in Indias sterilization programmes, which gave rise to speed doctors who competed against each other to complete the most number of operations every day, often under ghastly, unhygienic conditions. whizz celebrated figure was the Indian gynaecologist P.V. Mehta, who entered the Guinness Book of World Records for sterilizing more than 350,000 people in a decadehe claimed that he could perform forty sterilizations in an hour. tThese sweeteners for the procedure have at times been very strange and a little suspect, such as Uttar Pradeshs guns for sterilization policy in 2004, under which scheme Indians purchasing firearms or pursuit gun licences were told they would be fast-tracked if they could rou nd up volunteers for sterilization. A district in Madhya Pradesh also made a similar guns for vasectomies offer to its residents in 2008.