Dear Editor,
Far from becoming a burden on the nation, population is actually a national asset which needs to be harnessed to the full to make the nation truly prosperous in all respects and fields. India is fortunate that its huge population includes a very large percentage of youths who have the luxury of years, energy and agility to lead the nation for a significant period of time.
Had population indeed been a burden, many first-world countries would not have felt perturbed following the decreasing rate of growth, with the population of senior citizens exceeding that of the youths. Also, they would not have encouraged citizens to reproduce more by offering them various incentives. After all, who would run the nation in the future?
So, when leading figures of the Indian society lament about the ‘population explosion’ as if it were a hindrance to the nation’s growth, it certainly invokes a bout of laughter. It resembles ignoring the value of precious minerals by sitting upon unlimited gold or oil reserves.
By being true to the adage of a bad workman who quarrels with his tools, individuals leaders or authorities who are incapable of harnessing human resources to their full potential, or do not hold any desire to harness it, actually try to sweep their abject failures under the carpet of ‘population explosion’.
To ensure full utilization of human resources, the authorities need to create more and more job opportunities. But far from creating it – be it the centralized sector to states to private enterprises – all are engaged in a lunatic rat race to shrink human strength just to maximize profit or to lessen the ‘burden’ of paying salaries, pensions and related benefits like medical.
Today, there exists not a single sector in the country where vacancies after vacancies do not exist. When humanity and necessity demand more and more creation of job openings to provide livelihoods to the youths, and in turn render proper service towards the society, the hard reality remains that even the existing posts are getting more and more vacant.
Thanks to such ever increasing vacancies, the youths are not getting jobs, the ever-shrinking work force is getting burdened with more and more workload, and resultantly services also are not getting rendered in a satisfactory way.
Moreover, just like a chain reaction, vacancies in jobs resultantly affect others also. In office premises, many persons gain sustenance by vending food articles, tea and snacks. Most of them have fixed clienteles and earn their bread through honest hard work. As the years roll by, the personnel continue to retire, with recruitment being absolutely nil or negligible. Automatically, with the loss of clienteles, their incomes also get reduced, often compelling them to wind up their businesses.
If retrenchment is followed, even the children of the hapless job losers will have to forsake education and either starve or beg or enter the market of child labour. If more job openings will be created along with filling up of all vacancies in all sectors, our borders can be protected with more vigilance, our medical centres can provide better service, our educational sector can ensure better teaching, policing in society can be more stringent, people would have more money in their pockets, their children can get highly educated, the increase in purchasing power will increase demand, thereby providing the much-needed boost to the economy, and economic inequality will also decrease with all-round prosperity.
Countries like China and the USA have brilliantly used their population strength in the Olympics, always ranking in the top grades. More well-harnessed population translates to more doctors, technocrats, scientists and artists earning reputation for the country and contributing to the welfare of the international community.
Now, which path the authorities would adopt is their prerogative; but this excuse of ‘population explosion’ must stop immediately.
Sincerely,
Kajal Chatterjee,
Kolkata