THE PALL BEARERS OF PLANET EARTH

I am gradually getting convinced of two things: one, all this ozone rattling by various COPs is getting us nowhere; and two, that economists do not live on the same planet that you and I do. This was brought home to me conclusively last Sunday night when I was listening to Ruchir Sharma being interviewed by Prannoy Roy. Mr. Sharma, giving us the ten top trends for 2022, expressed alarm at India’s dropping birth rate ( we are now below replacement level for the first time ) and said that this was bad news, it would result in a drop in GDP and make it impossible for India to join the ranks of the developed countries. He further enlarged this Cassandra type prediction by warning the hugely impressed Prannoy Roy that no country with a declining fertility rate had ever done well economically. My jaw dropped to the floor and was retrieved only just in time for dinner. An explanation is in order.

Forget for a moment that, at eight billion souls, the planet is already overpopulated twice over and that experts have estimated that global population is likely to stabilise at about 11 billion by 2100. Forget that 77 million were added to the world population last year. Forget that if, every country enjoyed the living standards of the USA we would need five more Earth size planets to supply their wants. Forget also that the best quality of life is enjoyed by countries with low population growth- Japan, South Korea, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, even China nowadays. Let us look at our own country.

India’s population is about 1.4 billion, give or take a few million small change. 400 million of them are below the poverty line which, at US$ 2 per day itself suffers from a poverty of imagination. The unemployment rate is 8% and the LPR ( Labour Participation Rate) at 40% shows that people have even  given up looking for non existent jobs. Recently in U.P thousands of PHDs and law graduates applied for the jobs of drivers- and didn’t get them. And these are figures for the formal sector: the state of the informal sector- Mr. Amit Shah’s ” pakoda wallahs”- is far worse. The much touted ” demographic dividend” is now a demographic NPA and is sitting on its collective backside waiting for the economists to be proved right.

We simply can’t cope with these numbers of people; we can’t ensure them health, education, jobs, social security, a stable social environment, safety- all, incidentally, fundamental rights under the Constitution. Farmers migrate to the cities in their millions every year, land holdings keep getting fragmented, millions continue to be displaced by projects which benefit only the better off sections of urban India, tribals are FIRed out of their mineral rich forests. And it’s not a question of which is the right political or economic model; we have tried them all and failed. And Mr. Sharma still thinks that we should be adding more to this mass of deprivation ?

In purely environmental terms also, the worst economic template has been the one espoused by the Ruchir Sharma types- the neo-liberal capitalist model ( more easily recognizable as the IMF/ World Bank/ Adani/ Ambani model ). This worships only two Gods: consumption and GDP, all else be damned. And the tragedy is that all our COPs, whether in Paris or Glasgow, bow to the same Gods which is why the hymns they sing to Climate Change are actually dirges for Mother Earth. Consumption and GDP are actually the pall bearers of our planet. They are driving us to more and more relentless exploitation of the planet’s natural resources. A finite resource base cannot support an infinite demand for goods, whether it be water, minerals, land, forest produce, crops, meat, even land. The various COPs have not even looked at this dimension of the impending catastrophe.

 

Read the complete article: https://avayshukla.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-pall-bearers-of-planet-earth.html

  • Avay Shukla

    Avay Shukla obtained his Master’s degree (English) from Hindu College, Delhi, in 1973, and taught for two years at Delhi University before joining the Indian Administrative Service.

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