 |
JRD Speech_UN Pop Award |
|
|
1 Page 1 |
▲back to top |
MrJ R 0 Tata's Speech at the 1992 United Nations Population Awards
Ceremony
Mr Secretary General, Mr Chairman, Madame Executive
Director, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am greatly touched by, and grateful for, this presti-
gious Award. I honestly feel, however, that its impor-
tance far exceeds the value of the modest contribution I
may have actually made to the cause of promoting volun-
tary family planning. It is all the more difficult for me to
find adequate words to express my appreciation of the
honour accompanying the award because the goal of
India's long and arduous journey towards population sta-
bilization, which I tried to serve all these years, remains,
alas, still unfulfilled.
For me, personally, the journey began forty-one years
ago when I first realized that the relentless growth of my
country's population year after year held a serious threat
to its economic and social progress, or even to its ultimate
survival as a nation, to which so little attention had been
paid up to then.
The size and quality of the population of a country is
indeed a fateful one. Historically, when agriculture was
first developed on earth some 12 000 years ago, the world
population did not, I am told, exceed about ten million,
that is more than the population of London today. From
the beginning of the Christian era 2000 years ago, until
the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, it
reached more than the first one billion. The second bil-
lion took another hundred years, but thereafter, alas, in
our accelerating tempo, the third took only thirty years,
the fourth fifteen, and the fifth twelve years. The sixth
billion is already upon us and will probably be attained in
less than seven years from now.
Alarmed by the fact that this frightening rate of
growth was largely ignored in India, I took it upon my-
self, woefully uneducated in demography as I was, to raise
an alarm on the subject in the course of a speech,
undeterred by the fact that the subject of population
growth had never been discussed or mentioned in public
until then, even by those whose concern, I felt, should
have been aroused by the potential threat to India's
economy. I was motivated by nothing more important
than a kind of personal protest against the continuing
poverty of most of our people which had deprived them
for so long of even minimum acceptable conditions of liv-
ing and, in the process, had undermined all efforts at rais-
ing the nation's socio-economic development. The subject
became a personal obsession which still haunts me.
1951 was a transitional year for India, from which its
population began its exponential growth, aided by a
substantial fall in mortality, itself due to the gradual
eradication of famine and epidemics such as plague and
small-pox.
In the years that followed, it did not seem to me
enough merely to express indignation and worry while
trying to make such use as I could, of the limited opportu-
nities offered to me in the course of my activities in indus-
try to spread knowledge of the threatening situation and,
wherever possible, to support local programmes of family
planning. An opportunity to do a little more arose when
the Ford Foundation, for whose advice and support I re-
main deeply grateful to this day, suggested that I help in
establishing a working foundation to promote and propa-
gate the cause of family planning. They extended gener-
ous encouragement and support to it and I am happy at
the presence here this evening of Mr. Harish Khanna, the
distinguished Executive Director of the Family Planning
Foundation so created.
When our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru so
eloquently spoke in 1947 on India's tryst with destiny,
many of us visualized the rapid transformation of India
from the feudal to a progressive nation as was visibly hap-
pening in European and other countries within the post-
war decades of this century.
India did fulfil some of Jawaharlal Nehru's expecta-
tions in that it succeeded, helped by the Green Revolu-
tion of Dr Norman Borlaug in banishing famine from the
land, in reducing ignorance and disease and in raising an
unduly short life span, but it totally failed, sad to say, to
achieve the prime objective of reducing the rate of growth
of its population. As a result we continue to this day to
add to our population every year about seventeen million
people, equivalent to the whole population of Australia.
If the growth of the population of India continues at the
present rate, it will, in the remaining eight years left of
this century, reach one billion, rising to about 1.7 billion
a mere twenty-five years later, at a rate of annual increase
which is already the highest in the world including China.
Why has India, even though amongst the first coun-
tries of the world to establish a national family planning
programme, failed so dismally in its efforts to achieve that
one essential objective? In dramatic contrast the countries
of Europe, amongst others, in which large families were as
common as in India, succeeded in achieving within this
very century their transition to the adoption of a small
family norm. What prevented India from doing the same?
I believe, from repeated experience of life in Europe,
that their success has stemmed mainly from the existence
there of two fundamental socio-economic elements. First,
the firm determination amongst the child-bearing mem-
|
|
2 Page 2 |
▲back to top |
bers of their generation that their children be not only
strong and healthy but also well-educated or, at least, well
trained in the specialized skills required for a productive
career. The second element was their awareness that
today's cost of modern education or professional training
had become so high as to make it impossible for parents to
afford to support: large families. It is, I believe, the aware-
ness and acceptance of these two beliefs with the accom-
panying constraints that have transformed the social
habits of the people of those countries and motivated
them, willy-nilly, to control the size of their families. In
contrast, it is, I suggest, the absence of these two elements
in India that has been the main reason for its failure to
control the rate of growth of its population and therefore,
for its continuing poverty.
If the above view is accepted, I believe that the priority
in the continuing pursuit of population stabilization
must now be to find means of convincing the people of
India, particularly its parents, of the absolute need of
adopting small family norms in their and their children's
own interest as well as that of the country as a whole. But
time is of the essence. The speed with which the situation
has been getting out of hand ·can be gauged from the dra-
matic statistics recently released by the World-Wide Fund
for Nature and Friends of the Earth which brought out
that during the mere twelve days of the Rio Conference,
600 to 900 plant and animal species became extinct and
the world's population grew by thirty-three million.
These striking examples of the phenomenon of popula-
tion outstripping resources clearly call for immediate ac-
tion. Yesterday would not have been too early,
tomorrow may be too late.
Can we ignore the Resolution passed by the United
Nations in 1990 which adopted an International Develop-
ment Strategy and declared the last decade of this century
as a Decade for Accelerated Development. It specifically
recommended, as part of the strategy for the 1990s, that
special attention be paid to population growth and that
developed and developing countries alike should intensify
their efforts to allocate adequate resources to population
programmes, especially in most developed countries
where the lowering of the rate of population growth will
relieve strains on the social situation, economic growth,
the environment and natural resources.
It is good to know, Mr Secretary General, that the pri-
ority of the United Nations in this decade will be not
only to prevent or stop wars, but also to ensure peace and
prosperity for all by the fulfillment of the socio-economic
objectives they recommended.
In conclusion may I once again express deep gratitude
for the great honour which this year's Population Award
has bestowed upon me, and the hope that the last decade
of this century will prove to be one of effective action
inspired by commitment to humankind.