News of India recording the world’s most New Year’s Day births seems to have revived talk of a strict population control policy. But there is no need for panic. Nor state intervention.
For decades, doomsday theories of our population boom have been used to explainrising poverty and unemployment, food shortages and health crises, environmental degradation and climate change. This New Year’s Day, Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimated that nearly 400,000 children were born around the world on the first day of 2020, and that 67,385 of these births were in India. That is the highest number globally. China was second, with 46,299. It seems to have sparked off online conversations about our need for a population control law, talk of which has been in the air since Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to a “population explosion" in his Independence Day address last year. But neither India nor the world is experiencing runaway population growth. The country recorded 2,000 fewer births on the first day of this year than in 2019. Our headcount is rising, but at a slower pace than in any decade before. Fertility rates are dropping, and trends suggest that our population will attain stability without any need for state intervention.
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