Adjusting to Population Growth: The Case of India

If institutions were more broadly representative, would adjustment to population growth be more difficult? While there are many examples with which to test this idea, India provides a well-documented case. The country's per capita GDP in purchasing power parity dollars (an economic measurement standard used in all GDP figures below)⁸⁴ averaged 3.2 percent annual growth from 1983 to 1992,85 while its population grew from 735 million to 883 million during the period. One means by which Indian engineers have helped agricultural production adjust to population growth is through irrigation projects, relying initially on international loans. Large dam construction has submerged hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Indian assets in soil, forest productivity and biodiversity. Statistics on the Sardar Sarovar Projects, a dam and canal system under construction costing over $1 billion, provide some insight.

The reservoir behind the Sardar Sarovar Dam, which is only one element of a multi-dam effort planned for the Narmada River watershed in central India, will submerge 37,000 hectares (143 square miles) and will require an additional 80,000 hectares (309 square miles) for its canals. An estimated 100,000 people will be forced to relocate, and an additional 140,000 farmers will lose land to the major canals. Of course, by liquidating these assets, policymakers will augment the productivity of other, more distant agricultural lands in central and western India for some 50 to 100 years.

In a World Bank-sponsored assessment of the Sardar Sarovar Projects, reviewers found compensation and resettlement for ousted and affected farmers inadequate. They concluded that coastal fisheries near the mouth of the Narmada, upon which thousands of people now depend, would likely "suffer severe losses or be eliminated completely."⁸⁶ Despite ongoing construction on the project (which the World Bank refused to refinance), the overall pace of large irrigation projects during the past decade has slowed as Indian organizations representing ousted farmers have learned how to impede construction (or amplify its costs) through the Indian court system and the international and Indian press. However, to be successful, those costs must compete with the short-term political and economic benefits afforded by large-scale irrigation projects. And those short-term benefits keep growing, for India's current population of 970 million adds 18.5 million people every year, a population the size of Sri Lanka's.

India faces a similarly difficult task providing education for its growing population. While engineering graduates from India's technical universities compete capably with those of North American and European nations, most of India's public primary schooling‹attended exclusively by the lower economic classes‹remains woefully inadequate.⁸⁷ And as recently as 1993, only 68 percent of all Indian children (and only 54 percent of girls) ages 6 to 14 were attending school.⁸⁸

Pressures on the education budget are great. To some observers, prioritizing advanced education during the 1970s and early 1980s, when colleges received from 20 to 25 percent of the Indian government's education budget, paved a technological path for Indian economic growth. To others, basic literacy and health‹particularly for women‹should have received India's most urgent attentions.⁸⁹ Underwriting universal literacy, primary education and health care is an enormously expensive long-term undertaking in a country where 61 percent (over 590 million people) remain capability poor‹living in families that lack the basic capabilities for economic mobility, including decent levels of nutrition, health and female literacy.⁹⁰

But what if the poor had been proportionally represented in the policies of the Indian government? Quite likely, the government would have invested in primary education and health care for all. Equally likely, it never would have made investments that now accelerate overall GDP but leave the poor and marginalized behind. One can argue about how the Indian economy might now be performing, 50 years after independence, had this occurred. Doubtless, India would be markedly different.

In economic terms, India continues to accommodate population growth. In social terms, the poorest pay the price. Policies favoring some 15 to 20 percent of India's populace are rapidly building a modern country‹a second India‹inside a larger, much poorer, more rapidly growing population. In the long run, this may be a misstep. According to the UN Development Programme, developing countries that have attempted similar trickle-down strategies in the past have failed to sustain economic growth. Countries with similarly slow rates of change in human development⁹¹ and large income disparities, such as Brazil and Egypt,⁹² also experienced periods of moderate to high per capita GDP growth through the 1970s and for some years in the 1980s. Since then, neither country has been able to sustain appreciable growth. From 1983 to 1992, Brazil's per capita GDP on average declined by 0.7 percent annually, while Egypt's GDP on average rose by just 0.8 percent annually. India could face this dilemma in the coming decade.