It's a media favorite: the power-outage baby boom.
Nine months after a big power failure, you can almost guarantee a rash of stories about the supposed surge in births. In fact, this may be just another urban myth — it turned out that the number of deliveries nine months after the Great Northeast Blackout of November 1965 was within statistical norms.
Nonetheless, a lot of people apparently assume that human beings deprived of electricity turn into rabbitlike breeding machines. At least that's the theory behind a novel form of birth control being discussed in India.
Faced with an exploding population, the Indian minister of health and family welfare wants to electrify every village so people will have something to do after dark besides make babies.
"If there's electricity, then people will watch TV until late at night and fall asleep,'' Ghuman Nabi Azad said at a function to mark last month's World Population Day. "They won't get a chance to produce children.''
It's unclear whether Azad meant his comments in jest. But there's no doubt that competition for jobs, education and clean drinking water will become fierce — threatening the stability of the world's largest democracy — unless Indians rein in their runaway growth.
In the 62 years since independence, the population has tripled to 1.2 billion. In the next 20 years, India is expected to surpass neighboring China as the world's most populous nation.
"When I first went to India there was a joke that India had only two sports — cricket and the other was private,'' says Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Brookings Institution.
Somewhat surprisingly, India's fertility rate of 3.1 births per woman is not that much higher than the world average. That's largely because of the huge migration in recent years from rural areas to Mumbai and other major cities, with their greater opportunities for employment.
"There's a direct relationship historically between income and decrease in population,'' Cohen notes, "and what's happened is that in Indian cites, especially the prosperous ones, growth has leveled off.''
Not all Indians consider their vast numbers a liability. Many argue that because the population is young — the median age is 25 compared with 36 in the United States and 43 in Japan — the government doesn't have to maintain a costly social support system for the elderly. And a youthful work force will lead to a high rate of economic growth in the future, or so the theory goes.
"But that depends entirely — and this is where the story gets more important and complicated — on whether they can educate that population,'' Cohen says. "An illiterate population is a ticking time bomb.''
India has a global reputation as a high-tech center, but only 66 percent of adults can read and write. It was not until this month that the country's Parliament finally passed a bill guaranteeing free and compulsory education for all children between 6 and 14.
Despite the challenge of educating so many kids, Indians are adverse to anything that smacks of government-imposed birth control. Like China, with its notorious one-child policy, India had a draconian experience with family planning in the '70s.
"My own cook was sterilized twice,'' Cohen says. "The sterilization procedures were forceful — they would grab guys off the street and tie them off. Teachers had to have quotas of young men. That gave family planning a bad flavor.''
As happened in Japan, though, Indians are beginning to realize that voluntary birth control is a key to escaping poverty. "They figure out that if you want to educate your kids properly you want to have fewer of them,'' Cohen says.
Even if the idea of electricity in every village and a TV in every house goes nowhere, family planing may well get a boost from the soaring popularity of the Indian-made Tata Nano.
Quite a few Americans got their start in the back seat of a big ol' Ford or Chevy. But it's hard to imagine many amorous antics in a car whose very name — "nano'' — means small.
Source: tampabay.com, 23 August 2009