An Essay on the Principle of Population An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. Thomas Malthus London Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard Nov 21, · Essay on rural and urban life lukmaan ias essay test series pdf topics Essay rhetorical pakistan, essay situation population over in. Essay typer francais advantage and disadvantage of internet essay in gujarati. Essay on tell tale heart an essay on lichens, photo essay tungkol sa sunset tagalog write about my friend essay The population of India has grown rapidly over the last sixty years, from about million in to approximately billion today. Although the rate of growth has now slowed, India's population size is still increasing, and demographers expect it to reach billion people by , making India the most populous country on earth
An Essay on the Principle of Population - Wikipedia
Images like these, of starving children and a malnourished population given to periodic famines, offer a human face to the long standing debate about over population essay India is "overpopulated" or "underdeveloped". As the population of the globe over population essay past 6 billion, India is on the verge of surpassing China as the over population essay most populous nation.
For at least two centuries India has struck many Westerners as a place that is over-populated, famine-prone, over population essay, and, as a result, a threat to global stability. In fact, as historian Mytheli Sreenivas details, the question of 'over-population' is a relative one: is India producing too many people or too few resources?
Does a growing population represent an opportunity or a danger? These questions take on a new urgency and relevance as India emerges as a major economic over population essay and consumer society, and as the world confronts an ongoing food crisis.
This month, Sreenivas puts these pressing concerns about population in historical perspective. Readers interested to know more about current Indian history, please see this Origins article India's Dream State and these three essays on AIDS preventionrickshaw wallahsand Devadasi culture in India.
In the weeks and months prior to the current financial crisis, much of the world media was reporting on a global crisis in food. A seemingly inexorable rise in the price of basic food supplies in threatened poor populations around the world, and government leaders scrambled to contain over population essay social unrest that followed, over population essay. To explain this food crisis to an audience in St, over population essay.
Louis in Maythen-President George W. Bush pointed to the size of the Indian population. Claiming that India's "middle class is larger than our entire population," Bush argued that the demand for "better nutrition and better food" among this massive group had caused food price increases worldwide. Bush's remarks provoked an uproar among Indians, who refused to accept blame for the global food crisis, over population essay.
Many Indian journalists and government officials instead linked the spike in food prices to American policies that favored using grains for ethanol fuel and subsidized U.
Others, like analyst Pradeep Mehta, argued over population essay if Americans would just reduce their weights to the Indian middle class average, "many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates. Over population essay heated exchange marked another episode in a longstanding debate about whether India is an "overpopulated" place. Since the early nineteenth century, over population essay, some observers—Indians and others—have remarked that India's population is too large for the country's resources to sustain.
In more recent years, some in the United States and Europe have argued that this large population poses a global threat, as Indians consume an ever-increasing portion of the world's resources in a bid to satisfy an ever-growing population.
Population numbers seem to support these concerns. The population of India has grown rapidly over the last over population essay years, from about million in to approximately 1. Although the rate of growth has now slowed, India's over population essay size is still increasing, over population essay, and demographers expect it to reach 1.
The numbers alone cannot tell us the full story, however. The debates about Indian population size have also focused on the related question of under-production—that is, the problem is not so much too many people as too little food.
For more than two centuries, the question — is India really "overpopulated" at all? In early modern India, a large population was typically taken to be a sign of prosperity and progress. A densely populated area signified fertile land, the availability of labor, good governance, and peaceful conditions.
Small populations, by contrast, were seen as a sign of decline. A Maratha official touring the war-torn Mughal territories near Delhi and Agra in remarked with concern that "there were no ripening fields to be seen anywhere… The local administration was already oppressive—on top of that came the failure of the rains and the peasants died en masseso that entire villages were left uninhabited.
In the early nineteenth century, when the British East India Company controlled an increasing swath of territory across the subcontinent, Company officials pronounced that large and expanding populations demonstrated the superiority of British governance. In the words of one company publicist in"It is pleasing to view the cheerful bustle and crowded population … evincing a sense of security, and appearance of happiness, seen in no part of India beyond the Company's territories.
This longstanding equation of large populations with prosperity and good government began to change by the mid-nineteenth century, when British officials confronted a series of famines across the subcontinent. These famines, which occurred with shocking regularity from the s onwards, led some administrators to question whether India was a land depleted of resources straining to support an excessively large population.
Previous Indian rulers over population essay also confronted famines, over population essay, and the subcontinent was vulnerable to such crises because of its dependence upon monsoon rains. However, the British were the over population essay to develop an official policy that mandated specific responses to famine conditions. To frame this policy, some administrators turned to Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.
First published inMalthus's Essay argued that population growth, if unchecked, over population essay, would always exceed capacities of food production. According to Malthus, population growth could be limited either by preventive checks, which lowered the birth rate, or positive checks, which raised the death rate.
Preventive over population essay included such measures as postponement of marriage, celibacy, or contraception, whereas positive checks involved war, disease, or starvation.
The Essay proved enormously influential, and nowhere more so than in India. For over population essay British administrators, Malthus's "positive checks" seemed to explain recurrent famines. They suggested that British rule had created the conditions for rapid population growth across India by ending civil strife and curbing disease, over population essay.
Under the benign conditions of Pax Britannicathe population grew beyond the capacity of agricultural production. In true Malthusian fashion, famines ensued, resulting in a "positive check" on population growth. From this perspective, famines occurred in India because the British had "freed a tropical population from the tropical checks on its increase, without yet teaching it to submit to prudential restraints.
Even with this rosy view of the success of British rule, the question of how the government ought to respond to over population essay remained, over population essay. Followers of Malthusian ideas suggested that famine relief be minimal. While this might lead to starvation deaths in over population essay short run, the fatalities would be from the poorest class of laborers and beggars, a "class of men—so low in intellect, morality, and possessions" that their continued survival and reproduction would only worsen the situation of Over population essay. Official famine policy put some of these principles into practice.
Famine relief was held to the bare minimum, and to receive aid, all but the most enfeebled were required to labor for wages below market rates. The goal, from a Malthusian perspective, was simple: to discourage famine victims from seeking any relief, with the long term consequence of reducing their rates of reproduction and holding off the threat of overpopulation.
In the nineteenth century, British fears of Indian overpopulation were not prompted by an increase in population size, but by a crisis—famine—that threatened to reduce population numbers. When the recurrence of famine threatened to undermine British claims that their rule brought prosperity to the Indian colony, the British government responded by blaming Indians themselves for failing to control population growth.
The Viceroy, over population essay, Lord Dufferin, took this approach when he noted that inIndian agricultural productivity was low, and famines loomed, because of the "overflow of the population of large districts and territories whose inhabitants are yearly multiplying beyond the number which the soil is capable of sustaining. Yet despite this dire pronouncement, over population essay, there is no evidence to suggest that India was undergoing any rapid increase of population in comparison with the rest of the world.
Between andthe average increase in India's population was approximately 0. Consequently, by blaming "population" rather than colonial exploitation or mismanagement of production, the British colonial rulers essentially dodged any questions about the effects of their rule on Indian society.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, several Indian nationalist intellectuals began to develop a critique of colonial rule over population essay rejected the premises of British thought about the Indian political economy, including its assumptions of overpopulation. They argued that the problem in India was not "overpopulation" but "underproduction.
British rule had destroyed Indian manufacturing, but had failed to replace these sources of production with new modes of industry. This led to a situation in which, according to P.
Joshi"production falls off while population is advancing at its normal rate," leading to "the evil of underproduction. As a corollary to this thesis, Indian nationalists advanced the notion that famines were preventable through better governance. In the short term, they demanded that the British government offer more generous aid to famine-threatened areas, and in the long term, encourage industrial development.
For further proof of their argument, the nationalists looked to Europe itself. In England and France, over population essay, the population grew significantly during the nineteenth century, but the national income multiplied by even greater amounts.
Perhaps most importantly, over population essay, even when these countries suffered from drought, over population essay, they "invariably escape from the terrible grip" of famine. Consequently, the "increase of numbers is per se not necessarily or always an evil," Joshi argued, and in any case, Indian numbers were not increasing very greatly.
Colonial mismanagement—or worse—indifference to its colonized subjects was the problem, not overpopulation. The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a relatively slow rate of population growth. As a result, the census of came as a shock to demographers and the public at large; it revealed a much more rapid growth rate, of one percent annually, between and More worrisome to some, over population essay rate of growth continued to accelerate, and afterreached approximately two percent per year.
In the midst of this population increase, colonial India gained its independence from the British Empire inand was partitioned into the separate states of India and Pakistan. Both nations expressed concerns about population size, but the Indian government took up the issue with greater urgency. Under Prime Minister Jawaharlal NehruIndia developed a bureaucratic infrastructure to monitor, over population essay, and potentially reduce, rates of population growth. During the s, these efforts were joined enthusiastically by private sources of funding, most notably from American philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation.
Yet even while agreeing that Indian population growth be moderated, Nehru remained steeped in the ideas of earlier Indian nationalists, and focused more on increasing production than on decreasing population. Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Stanton Foundation.
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Origins Current Events in Historical Perspective Published by the History Departments at The Ohio State University and Miami University. Home Topics Africa. Middle East. North America. International Relations Religion Education Sports. Search over population essay Search. Connecting History. Hot off the Press. History Talk. Population Bomb? The Debate over Indian Population. by Mytheli Sreenivas. Editor's Note : As the population of the globe surges past 6 billion, India is on the verge of surpassing China as the world's most populous nation.
Over population essay and Prosperity in the Nineteenth Century In early modern India, a large population was typically taken to be a sign of prosperity and progress. Overpopulation or Underproduction?
Overpopulation \u0026 Africa
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