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| India-Pakistan |
| India's Population Boom - Dividend or Disaster? |
| 2011-10-16 |
| Pedestrians weave their way through a sea of cars, rickshaws and motorbikes, a desperate scramble for space just making the gridlock worse. The sidewalks are swallowed up by stalls and piles of garbage. The smell of open drains hangs in the air while overhead a web of electric cables crisscrosses the sky. India is one of the main engines of global population growth, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the crowded northern state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people. The world's 7 billionth person will be born on the last day of this month, according to U.N. estimates, and Uttar Pradesh, which added 33 million people to the global population in the last decade, is already staking its claim to be the birthplace of that child. The world has added 1 billion people in just the past 12 years. Though the rate of growth is expected to stabilize around 2050, India's will continue to climb. In the past decade, the country's population grew to 1.21 billion. India is set to overtake China as the world's largest country by 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. I wonder how much we could save if we got the U.S. Census Bureau to confine itself to the U.S. population? By 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29, and the country, like East Asian economies in the 1970s, is hoping to reap a "demographic dividend" from this army of young people as they enter the workforce and bolster the economy. They're ripe for the FDR solution - let the young pay for the old! Heck - let their young pay for our old! "It will be a dividend if we empower our young. It will be a disaster if we fail to put in place a policy and framework where they can be empowered," said Kapil Sibal, India's minister of human resource development, who said the country needs to impart job skills to 500 million people over the next decade. In Delhi, the Finance Ministry's chief economic adviser, Kaushik Basu, admitted that there are risks. "If the newly minted youngsters are not adequately educated and employed, they can become a source of disturbance, as happened in many Arab countries," he said. "We need to be concerned about this, though, frankly, if youngsters by causing a disturbance can strengthen democracy, I am not so sure that that is a bad thing." Wait until 'Democracy' settles down the in Arab countries, Kaushik. They don't think it means what you think it means. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #2 Anonymoose we are very much in agreement on this. I believe that India could be a tremendous ally. The future will require freedom. These are a very industrious people. Anything is possible. The government bureaucracy will retard their potential.Which shall it be. A future of hope or a future of despair. We were never to remain static. Develop all possible resources to the benefit of humankind.I see this as a dividend. Many will long for the old days and the old ways. That is not the future. Never resting and never ending."He who rests rots" Arthur Fiedler. |
| Posted by: Dale 2011-10-16 17:24 |
| #1 One simple solution would be to reduce the size of the bureaucracy by 2/3rds. Wide open entrepreneurship for small business would send their economy up like a skyrocket. They have an abundance of highly educated people who are so buried in government red tape that they have to leave the country to make their fortune. Lucky for us that many of them come to America. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-10-16 11:40 |