Barry Lyndon
22nd September 2010, 07:49
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Kerala_communist_tableaux.jpg
One of the most contentious issues in the world today is the question of how to achieve sustainable development, and all the more contentious is the question of how to do so by reducing the pace of population growth, particularly in the Third World where birth rates are very high. Attempts by First World countries to suggest ways for the Third World to reduce its birth rates have been met with suspicion at best and hostility at worst from developing nations, who consider such an imposition on them a kind of colonialism or even genocide. The province of Kerala in India has managed to level off its population without the large-scale ‘help’ of the IMF and the World Bank, by greatly expanding the social safety net for the region’s population and apparently eliminating the root causes for exponential population growth, and thus also saving the local environment. In the course of this essay I will try to eke out, to the best of my ability as an outside observer, whether Kerala is some sort of fluke or whether it is a model that is a practicable alternative to the official solutions that we are frequently given to overpopulation and resource exhaustion that exists in the Third World.
Since the industrial revolution, there have been a number of different theories as to the causes of the seemingly intertwined problem of overpopulation and environmental destruction resulting from the exhaustion of natural resources. One theory that has remained rather widespread up to the present day was put forth by the 18th-century English demographer Thomas Malthus. In his famous 1798 tract ‘Essay on the Principles of Overpopulation, Malthus said that the well-being of humanity and the environment that they lived off of was/is imperiled by the following:
“First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations. ...Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that 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.”(Malthus, p. 4)
Malthus went on to declare his support for the British Corn Laws, which put taxes on grain, on the grounds that it would teach the poor to responsibly breed and to not have so many children that would feed off the land.
It is from this worldview that the theory of ‘family planning’ emerged. Following in the footsteps of Malthus, although perhaps not so crudely articulated, is the widespread theory that the solution to the problem of overpopulation is for governments and international institutions to institute what are called ‘family planning’, in order to supposedly inculcate more responsible family-raising habits, usually meaning the promotion of birth control and contraceptives. Thus, the emphasis is on the individual responsibility of the poor to improve their own lives.
India was one of the first countries to attempt an aggressive family program as far back as the 1950’s, but the results of such a policy have been mixed over the last six decades. While the population growth in India has slowed in certain provinces, it remains largely outpaced by continuing exponential population growth. The success of government-backed promotion of birth control has had limited by a number of factors, but the most important of these has been, according to the World Health Organization, which is largely supportive of family-planning programs:
‘High levels of illiteracy, poor access to information, poverty, and gender-based disparities serve as significant barriers to family planning. These include social stereotyping, lack of male involvement in family planning, and continuing open discrimination against the girl child, adolescent girls and women…Access to quality health care is limited in both urban and rural areas. A substantial population residing in slum areas has no access to family planning services owing to poor health infrastructure.”(‘India and Family Planning, An Overview’-World Health Organization, 2009)
To make matters worse, family planning programs have been tainted by the fact that they exist in the context of a deeply stratified class society, with a technically illegal but still pervasive brutal caste system. This came to a head in the so-called ‘emergency’ period in 1976-78, during the administration of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when the government performed a record of 8 million sterilizations across the nation. There was widespread outrage, even riots in parts of India when it was discovered that there were many cases of lower class men and women being forcibly sterilized through vasectomies, in certain cases literally at gunpoint. Public resentment was a large part of what forced Indira Gandhi to be voted out of office in 1979, even though the program was scaled back in the face of popular backlash. This cemented in the mind of many lower class Indians that family planning was nothing more then another pretext for upper-class Indians to monitor and control the peasants and working poor, and perhaps even a form of genocide. (Gwatkin, 1979)
Kerala, while still a poor province, differs dramatically from the rest of India in a number of ways. Its life expectancy is 10 years longer than the rest of India(73 years as opposed to 63 years), the infant mortality rate is much lower than in the rest of India, literacy is almost universal(97%)and women are as educated as men and have important positions in local politics. Kerala has been politically dominated by Communists going back to the 1950’s, today known as the Left Democratic Front, led by the Communist Party of India(Marxist)( T.M. Thomas Isaac, 1984). Obviously, such a political orientation would suggest a strong rejection of the established solutions to creating sustainable development, which in theory would ‘balance’ sustainable development with outside corporate investment (officially espoused Communist ideology wouldn’t necessarily mean that, one need only look at present-day China as a counter-example).
Kerala does not reject birth control as a strategy for leveling off the population (in fact the intense national sterilization campaign of 1977-79 was in part inspired by the success of birth control in Kerala, but the Communist political leadership broke with the central government and denounced the programs excesses). But the regional government has rejected family planning as the sole component of achieving sustainable development. What is also emphasized is the expansion and maitanence of a publicly planned social safety net.
In the case of Kerala, large-scale outside corporate investment has been rejected in favor of grassroots solutions via a two-pronged strategy: a local government that prioritizes providing public human services to its population combined with the active participation of women’s groups, labor unions, and community councils who make decisions on a local level. About 40% of the provinces total budget is distributed to these councils in which an estimated 2 million people participate in 900 towns and villages. Therefore, a social arrangement is created. There is a state that attempts to use rational planning to gradually eliminate the poverty, illiteracy, short life spans and general insecurity that drives the local people to have large numbers of children. And simultaneously having strong organs of local control that can keep the government accountable and make sure that its policies are actually responsive to the community’s needs (Vernon Reed, 2001). As a result, Kerala has managed to build a network of schools, health clinics, public housing units and other services that while not eliminating poverty have managed to eliminate the extreme poverty that drives so many of the poor to have more children.
The direct participation of scientists in this effort has been considerable. Since the 1960’s the local government has supported and encouraged a group of scientists known as the Kerala Sastra Sahithya Parishad(Society for Scientific Literature), which advocates that ‘science should neither be confined to the laboratories nor should it be the exclusively the concern of highly trained specialists.’ This group of scientists, much similar in mission and methods to the ‘barefoot doctors’ in Maoist China, consist of many college-educated volunteers who live and work directly with farmers, giving them free instruction in more environmentally friendly farming methods while, if they can, giving them an education in scientific concepts relevant to their work. This is very much at variance with the widespread notion that people of that social class are incapable of understanding such concepts, or that they have no interest in doing so. The Parishad society, has, since the 1970’s, held environmental preservation and agricultural methods classes open to all, and the response has been enormous, it is common for tens or hundreds of thousands of farmers to attend such classes (K.K. Krishnakumar, 1977). These practices show that improving the condition of the poor and protection of the environment do not need to be goals at odds with each other, but instead go hand in hand.
Kerala’s rather unique achievements are emphasized by how it contrasts to provinces directly bordering it, which share a similar socio-economic status for most of the population, climate, agriculture, and population. Take the Indian province of Kartanka, directly to the north of Kerala. Kartanka, unlike Kerala, has largely spurned creating the social safety net that Kerala has set up, the only notable public services being the government family planning programs. The local government there is dominated by the Indian National Congress, which has been very supportive of free-market policies and the rights of private business.
And the results are reflected in the demographics: Kartanka has a average life expectancy 8 years lower then Kerala, its infant mortality rate is approximately 60 per 1,000 babies while Kerala’s is 12 per 1,000. The literacy rate is 66% as opposed to Kerala’s 97%, with the literacy gap between men and women being nearly 20%, while in Kerala it is only 6%, perhaps the lowest in India(Devaraj and Gopalakrishna, 2010). And underlying all this is the fact that while Kerala has managed to slow its decadal population growth to less then 10%, Karnatanka’s remains nearly 20%, while in some parts of India the growth rate continues to be nearly 30%(Census of India, 2010). The correlation is quite clear- in the regions of India where the women are more educated and thus have more opportunities, the need to have more children diminishes. Improved public health care also ensures that the poor will have less children because the threat of infants dying of disease is considerably less.
Dissident environmentalists and economists suggest that Kerala can be used as a model for other developing nations, as the material conditions in that part of India are not markedly different from other Third World countries, especially those who continue to have a large peasant population and agricultural base. Kerala stands out so starkly because so many other methods of sustainable development in the Third World, from unfettered neo-liberalism to social-democrat welfare state policies, have all too often failed to achieve the sort of progress that Kerala has. Even the so-called ‘Asian tigers’ have managed to achieve their rapid economic growth and prosperity due to large-scale economic propping up from the outside(Particularly large-scale American investment in the aftermath of World War II), while Kerala has managed to achieve what it has largely on its own(Parayil, 1997).
In this essay, I have admittedly briefly sketched out the outlines of how we may rethink the issue of sustainable development and the intertwined issue of overpopulation by focusing on a part of the world that is dealing with these issues in their most acute form. The example of Kerala suggests that while family is a necessary component of solving the problem of overpopulation and unsustainable population, it is not a sufficient component for dealing with the issue, and worse, if used as an exclusive strategy becomes a method of control and repression, not a remedy. What is needed is addressing and remedying the issues of poverty and economic inequality that plague much of the global South, and to challenge the pervasive acceptance of a philosophy of profit above all else, without regard to its human or environmental cost. Kerala, perhaps, has shown that the obstacle to the solution of the problem of sustainable development is not a question of how much money is invested or the responsibility of the poor, but rather is a question of how society and the global community uplifts its most destitute and vulnerable.
Bibliography
Devaraj K. and Gopalakrishna, B.V. ‘Human Development in Karatanka State: an interdistrict disparities’. Indian Journal of Economics and Business, 2010.
Govindan Parayil, ‘The Kerala Model of Development: Development and Sustainability in the Third World’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 5 (Dec., 1996), pp. 941-957
Gwatkin, Davidson R. ‘Political Will and Family Planning’
Population and Development Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 29-59
K. K. Krishnakumar ‘Science for Social Change’, Social Scientist, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), pp. 64-68
Malthus, Thomas. ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’. London, J. Johnson(Publisher), 1798.(Online PDF, http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf)
T. M. Thomas Isaac. ‘Review: Communist movement in India, in the electoral mirror’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 19, No. 5 (Feb. 4, 1984), pp. 200-201+204 .
Veron, Rene. 2001. ‘The New Kerala Model: Lessons for Sustainable Development World Development’ Vol. 29,No. 4, pp 601-617 Elsevier Science Ltd. UK.
Electronic sources-
Census of India website: http://www.censusindiamaps.net/page/India_WhizMap/IndiaMap.htm
India and Family Planning: An Overview(World Health Organization Website):
http://www.searo.who.int/linkfiles/family_planning_fact_sheets_india.pdf(2009 (http://www.searo.who.int/linkfiles/family_planning_fact_sheets_india.pdf%282009))
One of the most contentious issues in the world today is the question of how to achieve sustainable development, and all the more contentious is the question of how to do so by reducing the pace of population growth, particularly in the Third World where birth rates are very high. Attempts by First World countries to suggest ways for the Third World to reduce its birth rates have been met with suspicion at best and hostility at worst from developing nations, who consider such an imposition on them a kind of colonialism or even genocide. The province of Kerala in India has managed to level off its population without the large-scale ‘help’ of the IMF and the World Bank, by greatly expanding the social safety net for the region’s population and apparently eliminating the root causes for exponential population growth, and thus also saving the local environment. In the course of this essay I will try to eke out, to the best of my ability as an outside observer, whether Kerala is some sort of fluke or whether it is a model that is a practicable alternative to the official solutions that we are frequently given to overpopulation and resource exhaustion that exists in the Third World.
Since the industrial revolution, there have been a number of different theories as to the causes of the seemingly intertwined problem of overpopulation and environmental destruction resulting from the exhaustion of natural resources. One theory that has remained rather widespread up to the present day was put forth by the 18th-century English demographer Thomas Malthus. In his famous 1798 tract ‘Essay on the Principles of Overpopulation, Malthus said that the well-being of humanity and the environment that they lived off of was/is imperiled by the following:
“First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations. ...Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that 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.”(Malthus, p. 4)
Malthus went on to declare his support for the British Corn Laws, which put taxes on grain, on the grounds that it would teach the poor to responsibly breed and to not have so many children that would feed off the land.
It is from this worldview that the theory of ‘family planning’ emerged. Following in the footsteps of Malthus, although perhaps not so crudely articulated, is the widespread theory that the solution to the problem of overpopulation is for governments and international institutions to institute what are called ‘family planning’, in order to supposedly inculcate more responsible family-raising habits, usually meaning the promotion of birth control and contraceptives. Thus, the emphasis is on the individual responsibility of the poor to improve their own lives.
India was one of the first countries to attempt an aggressive family program as far back as the 1950’s, but the results of such a policy have been mixed over the last six decades. While the population growth in India has slowed in certain provinces, it remains largely outpaced by continuing exponential population growth. The success of government-backed promotion of birth control has had limited by a number of factors, but the most important of these has been, according to the World Health Organization, which is largely supportive of family-planning programs:
‘High levels of illiteracy, poor access to information, poverty, and gender-based disparities serve as significant barriers to family planning. These include social stereotyping, lack of male involvement in family planning, and continuing open discrimination against the girl child, adolescent girls and women…Access to quality health care is limited in both urban and rural areas. A substantial population residing in slum areas has no access to family planning services owing to poor health infrastructure.”(‘India and Family Planning, An Overview’-World Health Organization, 2009)
To make matters worse, family planning programs have been tainted by the fact that they exist in the context of a deeply stratified class society, with a technically illegal but still pervasive brutal caste system. This came to a head in the so-called ‘emergency’ period in 1976-78, during the administration of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when the government performed a record of 8 million sterilizations across the nation. There was widespread outrage, even riots in parts of India when it was discovered that there were many cases of lower class men and women being forcibly sterilized through vasectomies, in certain cases literally at gunpoint. Public resentment was a large part of what forced Indira Gandhi to be voted out of office in 1979, even though the program was scaled back in the face of popular backlash. This cemented in the mind of many lower class Indians that family planning was nothing more then another pretext for upper-class Indians to monitor and control the peasants and working poor, and perhaps even a form of genocide. (Gwatkin, 1979)
Kerala, while still a poor province, differs dramatically from the rest of India in a number of ways. Its life expectancy is 10 years longer than the rest of India(73 years as opposed to 63 years), the infant mortality rate is much lower than in the rest of India, literacy is almost universal(97%)and women are as educated as men and have important positions in local politics. Kerala has been politically dominated by Communists going back to the 1950’s, today known as the Left Democratic Front, led by the Communist Party of India(Marxist)( T.M. Thomas Isaac, 1984). Obviously, such a political orientation would suggest a strong rejection of the established solutions to creating sustainable development, which in theory would ‘balance’ sustainable development with outside corporate investment (officially espoused Communist ideology wouldn’t necessarily mean that, one need only look at present-day China as a counter-example).
Kerala does not reject birth control as a strategy for leveling off the population (in fact the intense national sterilization campaign of 1977-79 was in part inspired by the success of birth control in Kerala, but the Communist political leadership broke with the central government and denounced the programs excesses). But the regional government has rejected family planning as the sole component of achieving sustainable development. What is also emphasized is the expansion and maitanence of a publicly planned social safety net.
In the case of Kerala, large-scale outside corporate investment has been rejected in favor of grassroots solutions via a two-pronged strategy: a local government that prioritizes providing public human services to its population combined with the active participation of women’s groups, labor unions, and community councils who make decisions on a local level. About 40% of the provinces total budget is distributed to these councils in which an estimated 2 million people participate in 900 towns and villages. Therefore, a social arrangement is created. There is a state that attempts to use rational planning to gradually eliminate the poverty, illiteracy, short life spans and general insecurity that drives the local people to have large numbers of children. And simultaneously having strong organs of local control that can keep the government accountable and make sure that its policies are actually responsive to the community’s needs (Vernon Reed, 2001). As a result, Kerala has managed to build a network of schools, health clinics, public housing units and other services that while not eliminating poverty have managed to eliminate the extreme poverty that drives so many of the poor to have more children.
The direct participation of scientists in this effort has been considerable. Since the 1960’s the local government has supported and encouraged a group of scientists known as the Kerala Sastra Sahithya Parishad(Society for Scientific Literature), which advocates that ‘science should neither be confined to the laboratories nor should it be the exclusively the concern of highly trained specialists.’ This group of scientists, much similar in mission and methods to the ‘barefoot doctors’ in Maoist China, consist of many college-educated volunteers who live and work directly with farmers, giving them free instruction in more environmentally friendly farming methods while, if they can, giving them an education in scientific concepts relevant to their work. This is very much at variance with the widespread notion that people of that social class are incapable of understanding such concepts, or that they have no interest in doing so. The Parishad society, has, since the 1970’s, held environmental preservation and agricultural methods classes open to all, and the response has been enormous, it is common for tens or hundreds of thousands of farmers to attend such classes (K.K. Krishnakumar, 1977). These practices show that improving the condition of the poor and protection of the environment do not need to be goals at odds with each other, but instead go hand in hand.
Kerala’s rather unique achievements are emphasized by how it contrasts to provinces directly bordering it, which share a similar socio-economic status for most of the population, climate, agriculture, and population. Take the Indian province of Kartanka, directly to the north of Kerala. Kartanka, unlike Kerala, has largely spurned creating the social safety net that Kerala has set up, the only notable public services being the government family planning programs. The local government there is dominated by the Indian National Congress, which has been very supportive of free-market policies and the rights of private business.
And the results are reflected in the demographics: Kartanka has a average life expectancy 8 years lower then Kerala, its infant mortality rate is approximately 60 per 1,000 babies while Kerala’s is 12 per 1,000. The literacy rate is 66% as opposed to Kerala’s 97%, with the literacy gap between men and women being nearly 20%, while in Kerala it is only 6%, perhaps the lowest in India(Devaraj and Gopalakrishna, 2010). And underlying all this is the fact that while Kerala has managed to slow its decadal population growth to less then 10%, Karnatanka’s remains nearly 20%, while in some parts of India the growth rate continues to be nearly 30%(Census of India, 2010). The correlation is quite clear- in the regions of India where the women are more educated and thus have more opportunities, the need to have more children diminishes. Improved public health care also ensures that the poor will have less children because the threat of infants dying of disease is considerably less.
Dissident environmentalists and economists suggest that Kerala can be used as a model for other developing nations, as the material conditions in that part of India are not markedly different from other Third World countries, especially those who continue to have a large peasant population and agricultural base. Kerala stands out so starkly because so many other methods of sustainable development in the Third World, from unfettered neo-liberalism to social-democrat welfare state policies, have all too often failed to achieve the sort of progress that Kerala has. Even the so-called ‘Asian tigers’ have managed to achieve their rapid economic growth and prosperity due to large-scale economic propping up from the outside(Particularly large-scale American investment in the aftermath of World War II), while Kerala has managed to achieve what it has largely on its own(Parayil, 1997).
In this essay, I have admittedly briefly sketched out the outlines of how we may rethink the issue of sustainable development and the intertwined issue of overpopulation by focusing on a part of the world that is dealing with these issues in their most acute form. The example of Kerala suggests that while family is a necessary component of solving the problem of overpopulation and unsustainable population, it is not a sufficient component for dealing with the issue, and worse, if used as an exclusive strategy becomes a method of control and repression, not a remedy. What is needed is addressing and remedying the issues of poverty and economic inequality that plague much of the global South, and to challenge the pervasive acceptance of a philosophy of profit above all else, without regard to its human or environmental cost. Kerala, perhaps, has shown that the obstacle to the solution of the problem of sustainable development is not a question of how much money is invested or the responsibility of the poor, but rather is a question of how society and the global community uplifts its most destitute and vulnerable.
Bibliography
Devaraj K. and Gopalakrishna, B.V. ‘Human Development in Karatanka State: an interdistrict disparities’. Indian Journal of Economics and Business, 2010.
Govindan Parayil, ‘The Kerala Model of Development: Development and Sustainability in the Third World’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 5 (Dec., 1996), pp. 941-957
Gwatkin, Davidson R. ‘Political Will and Family Planning’
Population and Development Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 29-59
K. K. Krishnakumar ‘Science for Social Change’, Social Scientist, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), pp. 64-68
Malthus, Thomas. ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’. London, J. Johnson(Publisher), 1798.(Online PDF, http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf)
T. M. Thomas Isaac. ‘Review: Communist movement in India, in the electoral mirror’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 19, No. 5 (Feb. 4, 1984), pp. 200-201+204 .
Veron, Rene. 2001. ‘The New Kerala Model: Lessons for Sustainable Development World Development’ Vol. 29,No. 4, pp 601-617 Elsevier Science Ltd. UK.
Electronic sources-
Census of India website: http://www.censusindiamaps.net/page/India_WhizMap/IndiaMap.htm
India and Family Planning: An Overview(World Health Organization Website):
http://www.searo.who.int/linkfiles/family_planning_fact_sheets_india.pdf(2009 (http://www.searo.who.int/linkfiles/family_planning_fact_sheets_india.pdf%282009))