All hail the idiot box

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But when bureaucrats start demanding that people be put behind bars for producing more than the “stipulated” number of children, you can be sure you are in China.
Or can you?
I R Perumal, the principal secretary in the health and family welfare department, on Saturday advocated the desperate measure to curb the booming population in India. His prescription sounds a bit more radical than his minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad’s. While Azad wants to hand villagers the power of the remote so that they don’t turn to baser instincts, Perumal seems to think that punishing the careless, capricious and carnal lover will arrest the population explosion.
Late-night television or the threat of being put behind bars will not do the trick. What the government needs to do is incentivise reproduction, just like Singapore does. The more children you produce, the more tax breaks and goodies you get. It will lead to a temporary population boom alright, but then our country cousins will get too bored and stop being productive altogether. Don’t laugh it off just yet.
The politics of incentives is doing the farmer in, as you must have read in The New Indian Express on Sunday. Labour is hard to come by, what with the subsidized rice scheme. Labour cost is shooting up because a farm hand gets Rs 100 under the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. With food and money assured at home, labourers are loath to do what they have been doing for ages. So, if you were to employ the same logic to baby boomers, voila! The whole problem is solved in a jiffy.
Okay, let’s get a little serious now.
Azad’s and Perumal’s concern for India’s population is not misplaced, even though it may be 20 years late. The pressure on land, water and other resources is getting out of hand. And with the West breathing down our neck (“You Asians are eating too much. That is why there is a shortage of food in the world”) survival is going to be hard-fought. Already, there are reports of our groundwater being contaminated, among other things, with uranium. A lot of what we produce is meant for export (Virginia and organic tobacco along the Mysore-Coorg belt, for instance) and the cost of harvesting land is shooting through the roof.
Is it time then to do what China did in the late seventies-mid eighties? That is, aggressively implement the birth control programme through a carrot-and-stick policy. After all, some of us are trying to follow the Chinese in all that we do – be it in agriculture or low-cost technology.
Why not enter the bedroom too?