By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 15 1999 (IPS)

A landmark event due to occur in India Sunday – the birth of its billionth person – drew mixed reaction here from demographers and UN officials.

“India is a remarkable country – and this is a historic occasion,” Joseph Chamie, director of the UN Population Division told IPS.

Asked whether it is an occasion for celebration or mourning, Chamie said: “The United Nations is not making any value judgements. But I can tell you one thing: it is unlikely to happen again in any country in the world.”

Basing its calculation on existing data on mortality and fertility rates, the United Nations had concluded that India’s population should reach the one billion mark on Sunday Aug. 15, also India’s independence day, or within a few days.

But according to Indian demographers, the one billion mark would only be reached early next year. As a result, Chamie denied speculation by some journalists that the United Nations had “cooked up the figures.”

“Our calculation is based on figures available to us,” he said.

India’s annual population growth is about 1.6 percent, which represented 18 million people – roughly the total population of Australia. As of July this year, China was the world’s most populous nation with 1.3 billion people, according to the latest UN figures.

By 2050, India will add another 530 million people to its rising population and, if the current growth rate continued, the United Nations expected India to overtake China by the year 2045, becoming the world’s most populous nation.

Currently, India is the world’s second most populous country with 998 million people, followed by the United States (276 million), Indonesia (209 million), Brazil (168 million), Pakistan (152 million), Russia (147 million), Bangladesh and Japan (127 million each) and Nigeria (109 million).

According to UN projections, the US will have a population of about 350 million only by the year 2050.

“Even in the next 100 years, the world’s third most populous country, namely the United States, will not reach the one billion mark,” Chamie noted.

As the world’s second most populous country, India’s population was significant – economically, socially, politically and environmentally, Chamie said. “In any development discussion, India’s population has to be taken into account.”

The Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, on the other hand, took a totally different perspective of the Indian demographic milestone.

“Reaching one billion is not a cause for celebration in a country where one half of the adults are illiterate, more than half of all children are undernourished, and one third of the people live below the poverty line,” according to the Institute’s Lester R. Brown and Brian Halwell.

The two demographers said that India was spending about 2.5 percent of its gross national product (GNP) for military purposes but only 0.7 percent on health, which includes family planning.

“Unless India can quickly reorder priorities, it risks falling into a demographic dark hole, where population will begin to slow because death rates are rising,” they said.

The Institute also said that India today is paying the price for its earlier indiscretions when, despite its impoverished state, it invested in costly effort to design and produce nuclear weapons and succeeded in becoming a member of the nuclear club.

As a result, it now has a nuclear arsenal capable of protecting the largest concentraton of impoverished citizens on earth, it said.

Worldwatch Institute said that it may be time for India to redefine security. The principal threat now may not be military aggression from without but population growth from within.

The David and Lucille Packard Foundation, a California-based think tank, said that India faced many challenges in addressing population growth, yet there were similar stories of struggle and hope around the globe.

The Foundation said that about 30 million women in India have a need for family planning services that are not met by current programmes.

Meanwhile, the United Nations expects the total world population to pass the six billion mark by October this year.

“Reaching this landmark is an extraordinary achievement for humanity,” Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said.

She said that no era in history has sustained population growth so rapidly, while at the same time improving health and nutritional standards for most of the world’s people. At the same time, fertility and family size has fallen faster than ever before.

“The momentum of population growth has slowed, is slowing and will slow still further. We have something to celebrate,” Sadik said.

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