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Can We Afford 140 Million ?
Bangladesh's population at the end of the present century, which is a matter of ten more years only, is projected to reach 140 million. Can we afford to have such a population with the area and the economic and social indices remaining constant at around present figures? That's quite a question, perhaps one of the most important questions that the country now faces. A correspondent has written to The Daily Star from Beijing focusing on the very same question and contrasting Bangladesh's situation on the issue with China's satisfying performance on the same : score.
The answer to that is very easy. No, we cannot. It is not this answer that is sought while posing the question. What then? — is the true question that lurks quite transparently behind the obviousness of our headline today or of the article by the correspondent as published on Monday. We must, by all means, stave off an accretion of about 26 million in our population over the next ten years — that's again an obvious answer which again begets a tough query — how?
Before we go into an examination of that we must be sure in our minds that by cringing from the 140 million mark we do alm not to hit that in the next ten years alone — but that we decide not to hit it in a matter of fifty years by which time we can hope to raise ourselves from the present socio-economic morass. Only when we shall clearly be out of our present holes can we be able to grapple with that big a population. This thought, this keeping the 114 mark quite out of any time-frame and making It absolutely out of bounds for many decades to come, is sure to give a new perspective to all our plans and endeavours in the field of containing the present chain reaction of population growth. Radical growth in every aspect of our social being, excepting in population and poverty, is a precondition for proving a match for the 140 million mark. All this is another way of saying that our birth rate must diminish at a rate that it drops dead at zero growth before the century is out — and doesn’t pick up again anytime before many many decades.
Consonant with the above we must also be clear about another thing before we can hope to come to grips with the present population problem which so much resembles a cancerous growth. We can hardly entertain ‘can we afford 140 million?' as a good and meaningful question unless we first face up to the more primary one — 'are we quite affording our present 114 million?' The answer should be an emphatic no. We have miserably failed to make even 114 million affordable. When we had to contend with some 50 million less than that we were rending the skies with cries of this is no life. To improve on those days of unrelenting exploitation and injustice and indignity we carved out a state all for ourselves. Things have hardly improved after that and the population figure has raced past the 100 million mark as if in no time. There was at that time no sign by which we could say well this 64 million seems to be affordable. This affordability is a phenomenon that does not capitally relate to population statistics but calls for other socioeconomic parameters. That is where the story from Beijing — so definitive and enlightening — falls short of contributing meaningfully to the point of affordability. It focuses only on one of the aspects — how best to restrict population growth. The Chinese success story was there to Inspire us
But for Bangladesh it is much more than a question of the mechanics of bringing the size of the family down — with norplants or morning-after pills or whatever. It is a maddeningly convoluted maze of a social phenomenon crying not only for drastic measures in all directions but for restructuring at the base. And this is far from un-realisable. The Just concluded elections have provided reasons for optimism in all areas of national life. Given the will to overcome and the right quantum of application we can certainly, with time, improve on our socio-economic parameters just enough to make our present 114 million meaningfully affordable.