By Raj Lakshmi Dube
It was early on the morning of 2 May 1950 when a screaming child entered the world at the hands of a midwife in a small apartment in North Delhi. Three siblings were already sharing the space. The little girl was healthy and weighed seven and a half pounds. There was nothing special about her, except that there were already two girls in the house and the mother was partial towards her only son. Everyone wanted sons who could earn and carry the family name forward. In that race, if a girl was born, you tried again for a son. That apart, she added one number to the total population of the country, which stood at about 36 crore at the time. The insecurity that followed Partition pushed citizens to have more children. The lack of proper health care and hospitals added to their woes. That generation simply did not know how many of its children would survive to adulthood.
Her father had arranged a car to take all the children to school at the other end of the city, in the south of Delhi. The road cutting across the centre of the city delivered them in less than thirty-five minutes. With hardly any vehicles and very few traffic lights, the journey was smooth.
Within twenty years the population had grown to about 55 crore. Slowly the commuting time began to increase. More vehicles appeared and more traffic signals were installed. By 1990 the population had more than doubled since her birth year, to roughly 87 crore. By this time she had lost her husband and had started working in Delhi. She had to take different routes to reach her office in time, about forty-five minutes from the outskirts of the city. A new road had been built to decongest central Delhi, bypassing the city centre.
Apart from her own battles, that girl has now lived more than three-quarters of a century and watched the country transform.
By 2010 the population had reached about 123 crore. The cost of living was climbing steadily. In 1990 the family could manage on about Rs 4,000 a month, of which house rent took the major chunk of Rs 1,500. Life was still affordable without borrowing. Twenty years later, the same standard of living cost several times as much. Against the dollar, the rupee had weakened: the dollar, worth about Rs 8 in the early 1980s, stood at around Rs 45 in 2010, as imports outpaced exports. The dollar price now stands at Rs 95.01
Today, in 2026, India’s population is estimated at between 144 and 148 crore, depending on whether one projects forward from the 2011 Census or follows the United Nations estimate. From 36 crore to nearly 147 crore in one lifetime is an astronomical rise. The land, meanwhile, has not increased. It is the same 328.7 million hectares, or roughly 812 million acres, that it always was. Although India is the seventh-largest country in the world by area, it now holds the largest population on earth, about 17 to 18 per cent of humanity. The main causes are the longevity of the earlier generations, thanks to greater awareness of health and better medical services, and the sharp improvement in infant survival. India remains one of the world’s youngest major countries, with a median age of around twenty-nine years. With that many mouths to feed, to educate and to find work for, the country is constantly struggling to make ends meet.
One correction is due here, because it changes what should be done about all this. India is no longer a country of large families. The total fertility rate has held at 2.0 children per woman across two successive National Family Health Surveys, NFHS-5 in 2019-21 and NFHS-6 in 2023-24, which is below the replacement level of 2.1. Only Bihar and a small handful of other states remain above it. The brake on births, in other words, was applied a generation ago, and it worked. What we are living through now is population momentum: a very large number born in the high-fertility decades is still passing through its childbearing years, and people are living far longer than they once did. On the United Nations’ projections, India’s population will keep rising for another three decades, peaking somewhere near 170 crore around 2060, and only then begin to fall.
The Effect on Food
Every child born needs food. As the numbers rise, can the country provide all of them with adequate and healthy food? The old belief that a child brings two more working hands and only one more mouth, is fading, but its consequences are still with us. Mid-day meals are meant to close part of the gap, yet audits and repeated press reporting have documented poor quality and the diversion of grain, and the inspection system has too often failed to catch it. Children need to be in school, learning skills that will let them earn, survive and lead a decent life. And the grain the country eats is grown with a heavy load of pesticides, insecticides and chemical fertiliser, the long-term cost of which we have barely begun to count.
The Effect on Education
Where are the affordable schools? The few Kendriya Vidyalayas or government schools are not enough, and there are none in far-flung areas, least of all in the hills. According to the Education Ministry’s own UDISE+ data for 2025-26, 1,00,843 schools in this country are still running with a single teacher for every subject and every class. Besides teaching, that one teacher is also saddled with administrative duties. A good school remains a dream for the poor. As a result we have seen large numbers of teenagers dropping out and taking odd jobs at hotels and roadside businesses. Simply passing a law against employing teenagers is not enough when they have no alternative. Those who leave school drift around the villages until the compulsion to earn pushes them towards the cities, and with neither schooling nor work, some of them drift into crime.
Passing a number of classes is not, by itself, education. Without discipline, without respect, without a moral sense, a person cannot really be called educated. We have a very large number of degree holders. How many of them are truly educated? Where classroom teaching falls short, tuition classes have mushroomed in cramped and unhealthy lanes, and the same teacher is paid twice over. Once as a regular salary and then the tuition amount. Everyone is out to make money, at any cost.
Law and Order
Unemployed youth who begin with small thefts sometimes graduate to organised crime. Easy money is a powerful attraction, and a pistol is a status symbol for threatening the vulnerable. Women and children are the most exposed of all, particularly to trafficking, as the National Crime Records Bureau’s figures show year after year. Crime is front-page news every day. On the roads we read of reckless young drivers crushing pedestrians and smaller vehicles under their tyres, and of road rage born out of traffic snarls that no one has the patience to sit through any longer. Crowding sharpens the pressures and shortens the fuse on all of them.
The Unplanned Growth of Cities
As more and more people crowd into the cities, we watch the slums expand. Mumbai’s Dharavi, one of the largest informal settlements in Asia, is visible from space: an estimated seven lakh to one million people packed into roughly 590 acres, about two and a half square kilometres. About eight per cent of the city’s people living on a fraction of one per cent of its land, which is the real scandal, and one of the highest population densities anywhere on earth.
In smaller cities and towns that are still growing, migrant labourers brought in from nearby hamlets for construction work find vacant government land and settle on it, very often along river beds, where there is no sanitation of any kind because none was ever planned or provided. The rivers are polluted and so is the land, and the people living there bear the worst of it. Over time these settlements acquire documentation, permanence and political weight, and moving them becomes almost impossible, in simple human terms. Where would they go?
The government then calls it unauthorised construction and illegal occupation. But was no one aware of it when the settlement first came up? Someone watched every one of those shanties go up, month by month, and said nothing. The failure is not the migrants’.
Employment
India has the largest number of young employable people in the world, and we take pride in the fact. Most of them want a government job, and sanctioned vacancies have been shrinking for years even as the number of applicants has multiplied. The result is arithmetic that speaks for itself. In 2018 the Uttar Pradesh police advertised sixty-two posts of messenger, for which the stated qualification was a Class V pass and a self-declaration that the applicant could ride a bicycle. Some 93,000 people applied, among them 50,000 graduates, 28,000 post-graduates and 3,700 holders of doctorates. To put food on the table they will accept any work at all. What most of them lack is not willingness but a marketable skill. Do we have work for all of them? And self-employment, which is so easily offered as the answer, demands capital, contacts and a tolerance for risk that very few of them have ever been in a position to acquire.
Corruption
Fewer jobs and more unemployment feed corruption. Even when someone does secure a government post, however lowly, the citizen who wants to meet the officer above him, is expected to grease a palm on the way in. A case currently before the courts alleges that applicants for railway jobs were made to transfer family land in exchange for appointment; the matter is sub judice and the allegations remain to be tested. Newly built roads wash away in a single monsoon and bridges come down every year. The common person watches helplessly. In the hills, connectivity is cut off for days at a time and very little is heard about it, because development in this country is still largely a story about cities.
Natural Resources
We have used nature carelessly and for our own convenience. Every time I see trees being felled I feel a physical pain in my chest. A new expressway now brings the capital within two and a half hours, and we have lost count of the trees sacrificed for it. Why must we get from one place to another in ever shorter time? If it is far, let it be far. Delhi’s pollution is pushing people out towards cleaner air, and now the smaller city they are moving to, is bursting at the seams. Property prices here compete with the metros, and the roads are choked with vehicles from neighbouring states. This city was never built to carry a population of this size, floating or permanent. Bungalows and family houses are being pulled down for malls and eating joints, and we proudly call it development.
Tourism is big business, whether in the holy cities or in the cool of the hills. To carry the visitors, roads must be widened, hillsides are cut back, and landslides come down on ranges that were already fragile to begin with. Accidents are a daily occurrence. The loss of traditional crafts and of any local means of earning has driven the younger generation out to the larger cities, adding to the slums and concentrating the pollution. The great rivers have become drains. Even the Ganga carries industrial effluent along much of its course. Successive cleaning programmes have absorbed thousands of crores of rupees, and along long stretches of the river the results are still hard to see.
The land mass cannot grow in step with the population. In 1950 each Indian had, on paper, about 2.3 acres of the country to stand on. Today the figure is closer to 0.55 acres, and it is still falling. No number of high-rise buildings will ever be enough.
As for water, the water table drops every year. Multi-storied apartments draw up the groundwater and leave little for the settlements around them. The affluent can bathe any number of times a day, while in some villages people still walk kilometres to fetch enough water for a single family’s basic needs. Shrinking natural resources do not bode well for any country, least of all one that is still developing.
India has made technical advances by leaps and bounds over the last twenty-five years. We manufacture everything from pins to ships, rockets, drones and tanks. But if a country cannot meet the basic needs of the last person in the queue, on what grounds will we become a developed nation?
So the conclusion is not the one we have been repeating for fifty years. There is no longer a birth rate to bring down. Indian families have already done that, quietly, and without being told twice. What remains is a peak that is still some thirty years away and entirely foreseeable: roughly twenty-five crore more people than we have today, arriving in a country whose land, water and rivers are already stretched. We know almost exactly how many they will be and roughly where they will live. The only real question is whether we will build the schools, the water systems, the towns and the jobs for them before they get here, or carry on as we are and then complain that the country is bursting at the seams.
(Raj Lakshmi Dube is a freelancer. She writes articles on what affects her.)
