Those old enough to remember the 70’s will doubtless remember the fearmongering (some valid, some not) about overpopulation. How “The Population Bomb” was going to kill us all. I can *vaguely* recall movies shown in grade school on the subject, and how little apparent impact those had on people of my generation when it came to reproductive behavior… but wait until the 80’s and the AIDS panics, and *that* had an impact.

But in places like India, where the effects of overpopulation were more immediate and obvious, the governmental response to the dangers of overpopulation were rather more muscular:

The Legacy of India’s Quest to Sterilize Millions of Men

In the 1970’s the Indian government managed to sterilize (via vasectomies) a vast number of men. In the years since, though, the efforts have switched to sterilize (via tubal ligation) women. The author of the piece seems to be of the opinion that that’s sexist or some such, but consider:

1) In a society filled with poverty and bagrillions of kids, who most directly suffers from unplanned pregnancy? The guy who can simply split, or the woman who actually gets pregnant?

2) Assume a hypothetical… ten healthy men, ten healthy women. On one hand, assume nine of the men get sterilized. How many pregnancies can you theoretically have? Well, ten. That one unsterilized guy can still impregnate all ten women. on the other hand, assume all ten guys remain untouched, but nine of the women get sterilized. How many pregnancies can you have now? If the goal of your sterilization efforts is population control… you go after the women.

On one hand, the efforts to control population in India failed: the current population is 1.3 *billion,* twice what it was during the “Emergency” of 1977. From the viewpoint of the time, this should have led to utter disaster of Soylent Green levels. But two things overcame that: India became more of a free market capitalist economy, thus enriching everyone, and the Green Revolution came along and made Indian food production much more efficient and productive. Consequently, Indias population exploded to the point where it has almost caught up with China, while at the same time the overall quality of life has greatly improved. Whether that will last… shrug. One good war, one good crop-blight, one good plague, one good switch to a socialist economic system, and one point three billion Indians could find themselves suddenly *really* hungry, really fast.