Overpopulation Of India Essay

With the emergence of the modern era, a new problem has arisen to challenge every person from each nation on the globe. One nation in particular has had much more difficulty with this issue than others. India is currently facing the dilemma of how to control its population in order to preserve order in its country. This has never been much of a problem throughout history, as nations usually went to war, suffered a famine or some other disaster occurred to fix any problem that it might face with population. This held true for India until after World War II, when the country’s population exploded. In this age of ethics and non-violence, this situation poses a particularly interesting dilemma for the people of India, and subsequently everyone

The reasons why Britain did this came from famines that kept striking India, and as an extension of the Empire, Britain felt compelled to help the inhabitants of the colony. Moreover, studies were conducted by British officials on the census data and, according to Sarah Hodges, came to a conclusion that “…colonial concern with famine and population was loosely based on a Malthusian model. In this scheme, population operated in a system of natural checks and balances (e.g. a high death rate during famine and a high, post-famine birth rate).” For those who have not heard of Malthus, he was an English economist who proposed that population had a limit and that the restrictions placed upon the population were directly correlated with how many resources the population controlled and consumed. To put it in Malthus’s own words: “…the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” This assertion by Malthus states that there is no way that man harvest enough from the earth in order to keep pace with the demands of the population. In short, there will come a time when the population will overshoot the natural limit, at which time nature will check the population. This will cause the population to decrease at or below the limit and plateau for a time. Therefore, Hodges’s conclusion stands that the British Empire would have seen the deaths from the famines as a way for nature to check the Indian population. Likewise, the British officials would view the scenario of a high birth rate after the famine as a natural consequence from the loss of life during the famine. This cycle of checks and balances was