GDP: Gross Domestic Population

Jug Suraiya 

Ever since Sanjay Gandhi’s infamous nasbandhi, or forced vasectomy drive, Family Planning has been a no-no in Indian politics. Indeed, thanks to the Sangh Parivar’s claims that the Muslim community is breeding faster than the majority community have almost made it a quasi religious obligation for Hindus to procreate more prolifically.

Now, however, with India’s population, at some 1.3 billion and growing rapidly, poised to overtake that of China, the world’s most populous country, alarm bells are once again beginning to ring in the topmost political circles.  Both PM Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, the diarchy which rules the Indian polity, have come up with statements warning against unregulated population growth.

This U-turn regarding population has caused much comment, conjecture, and not a little consternation, particularly among saffron bhakts, as shown by the following conversation.

1st bhakt: Modiji and Amitji have both said that all of us need to stop having so many bal bachhe. How did it come to this? 

2nd bhakt: It was all thanks to a thing called Family Planning.

1st bhakt: Family Planning?  What was that?

2nd bhakt: You remember those things called Five Year Plans that we used to have which were meant to ensure that we kept producing more and more things, like cement, and steel, and stuff like that?  Well, Family Planning ensured that we kept producing more and more bal bachhe and make our families bigger and bigger.

1st bhakt: How did this Family Planning come to mean that we had bigger and bigger families?

2nd bhakt: It did so by the chanting of mantras.

1st bhakt: The chanting of mantras?  What mantras?

2nd bhakt: Mantras like Hum doh, hamare doh.

1st bhakt: Hum doh, hamare doh?  Doesn’t that mean ‘We are two, we have two’?  How does that add up to us having bigger and bigger families?

2nd bhakt: Simple. It added up to us having bigger and bigger families because it got lost in translation, and became Hum doh, hamare nau, which means ‘We are two, we have nine’.

1st bhakt: uh, oh.  I can see how that could end up giving us bigger and bigger families.  Were there any more such Family Planning mantras?

2nd bhakt: You bet there were.  Like Ek ya doh, bus, which means ‘One or two, is enough’, which also got lost in translation to become Ek ya do, dus’, which means ‘One or two, is ten’.  

1st bhakt: I can see how all these lost-in-translation mantras got us to the stage where we now have a population of 1.3 billion.  

2nd bhakt: Just so. But that by itself wouldn’t be such a problem if while our population kept on growing, jobs kept growing at the same rate.  But they didn’t.  So now we have too many people and too few jobs. Which is why Modiji and Amitji are now saying we must cut down on the number of bal bachhe that we have.  It’s got to do with something which economists talk about called GDP.

1st bhakt: GDP?  What’s that?

2nd bhakt: Well, it generally stands for Gross Domestic Product, which means all the things like cement, and steel, and stuff that the Five Year Plans were about, a country produces.  But in our case GDP has become Gross Domestic Population, which if we don’t do something about will lead to yet another kind of GDP.

1st bhakt: Yeah?  What’s that?

2nd bhakt: Gross Domestic Poverty….