The world of today faces two grim perils - (a) population explosion and (b) Nuclear War. The Nuclear powers seem to have realized the futility of nuclear war, and dare not attempt it, for it would only mean total destruction and there would be no survivors on either side.

          So far as India is concerned exploding population has not only neutralized but rendered futile all its effort to achieve an economic breakthrough to catch up with the affluent and industrially developed countries of the west. According to census as on March 1, 2001, the population of India stood at 1027,015,245 comprising 531,277,076 males and 495,738,169 females. In a decade - that is from the last headcount in 1991 to the latest in 2001, India's share in world population has gone up to 16.17 per cent even while the country registered a fall in the last decade's growth rate by 2.52 per cent.

          As a final desperate remedy the Government has attempted to tackle the aforesaid problem on a war footing and even went to the extent adopting certain pressure tactics to achieve its sterilization goals. As in now well-known this approach boomeranged and back fired in an explosive manner.

          The magnitude and seriousness of this menace have even made our Prime Minister to suggest sterilization and he favoured voluntary measures, particularly abstinence. But sensing that this may not be practicable with the vast majority of the poor people in the country who lack even two square meals a day, leave alone other diversions and entertainments. However it is to be seen whether persuasion could work and produce the desired results.

          Under the present conditions, poverty and pollution increase in proportion to direct population growth. Food production has been never able to keep up with population growth. More than half the world's population is permanently hungry, pollution of water ways and scarcity of water for human consumption and for agriculture has become acute. Destruction of forests for leaving space and agriculture, necessitate by the ever increasing growth of population, has seriously affected the economy of many countries, removing soil fertility, causing harmful disturbance of nature's hydrological cycle, and lowering the watertable to alarmingly low levels besides rendering them saline and unfit for straight use. The very air we breathe is polluted to dangerous levels. Thermal power stations belch smoke and smother the atmosphere. Poor people burning dry cowdung and rubbish for heating and cooking, add their share to it. The highly industrialized countries are even worse off in this respect. Their chemical and metallurgical factories discharging colossal quantities of industrial chemical wastes, very harmful to biological species, into water way and the atmosphere, have ruined both. Many countries have woken up to this danger and have begun seriously tackling the problem; prescribing stringent laws and regulations for pretreatment of wastes, for removal of harmful factores before discharge and disposal. But the damage already done many even be irreparable, and it may take a long time for their waterways and landscape to come to life again.

          In India and the other developing countries, their poverty and helplessness is the worst kind of pollution. Disposal of human wastes is a horrid nightmare. Except for a few big cities, there are no underground drainage and sewage systems, and the open earth receives all kinds of refuse, filth and rubbish and causes endemic and epidemic diseases. More than half the population are permanently hungry and live in squalor, filth and disease and ignorance, in sub-human conditions. A vicious system, in the name of democracy, allows a few rich people to get richer and richer in geometric progression, and conversely the millions upon millions of poor people keep getting poorer and poorer in the process, producing more and more children and creating more and more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and keep alive, in the mistaken belief that more children means more money in the context of the prevalence of child labour, overt and covert.

          All efforts to improve India's economic and to provide a higher standard of living for her people will be doomed to hopeless failure unless cancerous population growth is rigorously checked. Paradoxically, it is the poor who are more prolific and desire and produce more children foolishly believing, though with some reasons, that more children mean more money earned with their labour.

          The remedy for the economic and social ills of India, which also affect her political status in the International sphere, is rigorous control of further births. The best mean which will be effective for the purpose are -
(a) Proper education, on the advantage and advisability of restricting child-birth to a maximum one per couple
(b) Easy availability of birth control devices of proven efficiency with the fair range of choice and free of cost
(c) Compulsory birth control for those with two children and
(d) Total ban on child labour to be effectively implemented under statutory legislation.

          The continuing population explosion is a real and serious threat to our very survival, is the biggest and toughest road block on our march to economic prosperity and strength. Continuance of population growth should not therefore be viewed from narrow party, community, caste, regional, racial, prejudices, and belief and should be examined and acted upon objectively and realistically. Many educated and enlightened leaders, statement and thinkers appear to doubt the need for launching a family planning drive by the state. They argue that such a measure was not followed by western democracies and yet the population growth in those countries has been brought down to the zero increase rate. Hence, they suggested that the state should be concentrated on education, economic growth and improved standard of living, which would automatically act as a check on a population explosion. But they fail to appreciate that those countries were industrially developed, economically advanced and educationally geared to promote automatic family planning. India, on the other hand, is backward in all these spheres and this very backwardness is causing population problem setting at naught all national efforts towards economic progress. If the present trend of population growth continues, we will never be able to become an industrially, technologically and socially advance nation.

          Let us not therefore delude ourselves. Let us face naked truth and accept the challenge boldly. Let us work unitedly and with proper zeal. Let us put an end to the grave threat of population by acting swifty, surely and with utmost importance. The nation is confronted with the worst peril. Our survival hangs in the balance. Let us not waver, falter and fail. Let us dare, do and succeed.