The New York Times

Sunday, September 19, 1999

Rethinking Population At a Global Milestone

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

UNITED NATIONS - HALF a century ago, just as the world was about to give birth to dozens of new countries, two great Asian nations, China and India, were remaking themselves in starkly differing ways as models for an age of nation-building The Chinese Communists, who completed their long march to power in Beijing 50 years ago next week, chose top-down re-engineering, overturning traditions in the name of ideology, while India emerged from a successful nonviolent independence movement in 1947 with a strong commitment to British-style democracy with an Indian face.

For what was then known as the Free World, there was no contest.

"India emerged as a significant leader of the newly independent states choosing the path of democracy," said Phillips Talbot, a former Assistant Secretary of State who has been watching India since the 1950's. "It looked very promising."

To Americans, he said, "China was a Communist country. It was antagonistic to us. Whatever it was doing it was doing by very strong authoritarian policies."

On Oct.12, when the world officially declares that it has reached the 6 billion population mark, there will be cause to look again at China and India, still separated

from one another by psychological and political walls as high as the Himalayas that divide them geographically. Together, India with 1 billion people and China with 1.2

billion account ffor more than one-third of al humans on Earth. And once again, their paths diverge - this time in human terms.

China, which foundered in Maoist excesses in its first three post-revolution decades, took stock of itself in the late 1970's and, under Deng Xiaoping, began to rewrite its policies.

Even as they issued the harsh decree that families could have only one child, the Chinese also put together a comprehensive package of changes in the economy, rural

land ownership and social services - and the country began to take off. Lamentably, Western experts often emphasize, political democracy was not part of the package. But the sweeping changes paid off in many other

ways.

Semi-socialist India, on the other hand, lagged in introducing fundamental economic and social reforms to match China's perhaps, ironically, because in a democracy

such measures have to have some popular support. There was also history: India's legendary first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, set his sights on big industries, not

village schools or rural doctors.

If current trends continue, India will surpass China as the most populous nation in the next half century. It enters a new millennium with work still to be done on a gigantic scale that the world cannot ignore.

Indians vote for their national leaders and enjoy free expression, but democratic India has not delivered on its promise of a better life for most Indians. Authoritarian China has done much better on that score. Nearly 83 percent of Chinese can read and write; only 53 percent of Indians are literate, according to the United Nations (India says it's 64 percent), and most of those who can read are men. China boasts a female primary school enrollment of 99.9 percent; nearly a third of Indian girls are not in school. More than half the children under five in India are malnourished and underweight; in China the figure is 16 percent About half the Indian population lives on less than a dollar a day; fewer than 1 in 3 Chinese do.

Astonishingly for an open society, India also falls behind China in communications. The Chinese have 56

telephone lines for every 1,000 people; India has 19.

There are 6 personal computers for every 1,000 Chinese

and 2.1 for each 1,000 Indians. In economic terms, China's exports are more than five times those of India.

It has not always been this way. Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics and author of a new book,

"Development As Freedom" (Knopf), always points out that democratic India, which got a head start in the 1950's, escaped the kind of famines it had suffered under

colonialism because famines result when leaders react

badly to nature's whims, and in India, popular demands

for effective action could be reflected in the media.

China, under the Great Leap Forward, endured one of

history's greatest famines, as did Ukralne under Stalin

and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, because of

disastrously wrong-headed agricultural policies. But the

last 20 years or so have been different in China, where

modernization, openings to a free market and now

prototype elections have made a dent in rural poverty

and its mindsets. Economic reforms also updated China's cities in a generation.

WHAT is going on here? Could it be that China's draconian population policies, including enforced abortion and impoverishment for those who didn't comply, are paying off in a hurry?

Could it be true that democracy is not the most efficient way to bring a country out of poverty? Or is it that political leadership, more than the political system,

matters most?

Professor Sen, an Indian citizen who is the Master

of Trinity College, Cambridge, is on the side of caution.

"Mere democracy may not be adequate," he said last week in remarks to the Carnegie Council on Ethics and

International Affairs in New York. "But that doesn't

mean that democracy is not important." At a time when

every hoary old assumption about what makes nations

prosper is being rethought, political democracy may be

only one of a number of components, he said Another is

population control.

"The key in talking about population growth," said

Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in

Washington, "is not whether India is a democracy or not, but whether there is leadership. By leadership, I mean leaders who will talk about the problem, discuss it and what it means to the next generation and the generation to follow."

Tavleen Singh, one of India's most acerbic political

columnists, believes that when political will is missing,

nothing else works. She posed a few questions to politicians recently in the newsmagazme India Today.

"Would, for instance, our political parties like to explain to us why the image of the average Indian child, 50 years after Independence, is that of a scrawny, spindle-legged, barefoot creature who ekes out an existence by begging at traffic lights?" she wrote. "And amid the shameful squalor that is most of India, would they like to explain why our political leaders live in huge bungalows set in sprawling gardens that we taxpayers pay for?"

She points to the absence of effective welfare and population policies, and the persistence of the Hindu

caste system, as causes for India's slide to the social

levels of sub-Saharan Africa. Indian socialism, on the

wane in any case, never had the strong welfare-state

component found in Europe. Now, as India adds more than 18 million people a year to its population, will there

be a demand for harsher measures for population control?

Ashish Bose, an Indian demographer, says no. "Our masses will not accept any coercive method of family planning," he said. He, like many development experts, says population control can in any case no longer be looked at in a vacuum. What good is a family planning clinic, he asks, if no road goes there?

In other countries, as within the varied states of 5 India, moreover, surprising contradictions point up

5 the traps in seeking quick answers for why population control seems to work in some places but not in others. In Bangladesh and Indonesia, which were under military rule, private development and environmental organizations began to fllourish, along with successful family planning programs of all kinds.

General Suharto, the President deposed last year in Indonesia, opened condom factories and encouraged

"supermarket style" local family planning centers.

There were none of those grimy, unsanitary sterilization

camps that are often all that is available to the majority of rural Indian women, and no harsh laws like those in China that prevent most families from having more than one child.

Yet Adneune Germaine, president of the Women's International Health Coalition, which supported women's groups in Bangladesh, says this doesn't indicate that autocracy or human rights violations are necessary for successful population programs. "While there have

sometimes been lapses in the quality of care and the

voluntary nature of the programs in Bangladesh or

Indonesia," she said, "over all, you haven't seen some of

the draconian measures taken by China."

"But what is important to mention is that while, yes,

the Chinese Government was autocratic, they were

autocratic also in insisting that all children should be in school and all people should have basic health care and all people should have housing," Ms. Germaine said. The package improved the lives of many Chinese, creating

more support for the family planning program than

many outsiders would expect, some experts say.

"Chinese expanded freedoms of a different kind," Professor Sen argues, adding that China's critics often

do not recognize that educational opportunity and universal health care liberate people to live longer, more fulfilling lives. Professor Sen also says that India has missed opportunities that might have made its performance more comparable to China's. When lower fertility is harnessed to democracy it creates a dynamo, he says and more so if literacy and economic opportunities for women as well as basic health services are added to the mix. He faults much of India, including liberal economic thinkers, for not seeing these connections.

Mark Malloch Brown, the new administrator at the United Nations Development Program, is on the side of patience. "India is changing," he said. "Its sheer size means that there's a persistent rural backwater, where caste, a lack of basic services, poverty, means that change is a hell of a lot slower than we've all hoped. But I think we are arguing about speed rather than final outcome.

"My point is to be a bit more agnostic about which

policies work, about final outcomes," he said. "Both

countries - India and China - are going through

historical spasms on development issues. One made this

extraordinary human engineering intervention - and it

this was a hundred-yard sprint, they've won. But you

know, societies are a marathon, and it's just too soon to

be so declarative."