Our dirty little secret.

Socialists like to help poor people but they do not like to count the number of the poor, so when a socialist newspaper publishes an article about numbers then things must be getting very serious indeed. Apparently, everyday 68,922 people celebrate their 25th birthday in India, which means that 2.1 million turn 25 years old every month, of whom 1.48 million are in rural areas while 0.62 million are in urban areas. By 2025 there will be 690 million under the age of 25, out of a total population of 1.43 billion. Scary. Malthus predicted that if population growth went unchecked then it will outstrip food production resulting in famine, which is nature's way of restoring balance. There are those who refute this view by saying that human beings will find ways of increasing food production as needed. Scientists tell us that genetically modified, or GM, food is the panacea for food scarcity. Is it? 60 million acres of US farmland have been taken over by ' superweeds ' resistant to Monsanto's weedkiller. GM seeds are expensive so farmers take loans to buy seeds and fertilisers. If a crop is destroyed by the weather the farmer has no money to buy more seeds. Alternatively, if there is a bumper harvest prices drop so much that the farmer is unable to pay his creditors. In either case suicide is the way out. Even if GM technology is able to deliver large amounts of cheap food even that has to be paid for and for that people need to have jobs. How is India going to produce 600 million jobs? We are told that if the economy can be made to grow at 8-10% then millions of jobs will be produced, which will increase spending, resulting in increased investments, which will create more jobs in a perpetual cycle of wealth creation. Will it? Turns out that the much touted high growth, during the first term of the Congress from 2004 to 2010, actually lost 5 million jobs. What will the young do if there are no jobs? One solution is to migrate illegally to other countries. But it is not easy to find jobs without skills so they end up sleeping rough. Or there could be riots, as occurred in Egypt, which also has a demographic bulge, where young people wanted jobs so that they could get married. And therein lies the problem. More people having families means even higher numbers of young people looking for jobs, in a never ending cycle. Would education provide a stimulus for job creation by providing a highly trained workforce that companies would exploit? Half of all university graduates in the UK are in menial jobs which require no degrees. Scholars write scholarly papers about the different growth rates of states in India. One such study suggests that sub-nationalism in Kerala was responsible for its higher development over UP. Maybe, but 3 million are working abroad which is supporting its economy. Perhaps Kerala' superior development is because its fertility is half that of UP. Trouble is, poor people mean more social schemes and more NGOs. Our politicians love that.