Guest post by MITU SENGUPTA

Last Monday, Nargis Yadav was declared the world’s symbolic seven billionth resident by Plan International, a child rights group. She was born to a family of farmers in a sleepy little village in Uttar Pradesh.

Nargis is surely an unwelcome child, given the grim projections that surrounded the UN Population Fund’s declaration last month, that the world’s population was about to breach seven billion.  Experts have issued sombre warnings of the devastating impact of the growing number of humans on earth. We face a bleak future of environmental distress and scarcity, they say, in which even the basics of food and water will be in short supply.

One wonders why, on October 31^st – Halloween, to be precise – the UN did not name a blue-eyed baby boy from Washington, Bonn, Sydney or Toronto as our uncertain world’s symbolic seven billionth? To be sure, this would be politically incorrect, for we live in times when the well-meaning, in their bid to be representative and inclusive, scramble to push women and minorities to the forefront.  But here is an instance where keeping to pedantic liberal pieties has suppressed an honest portrayal of things as they are.

At one level, choosing Nargis as our troubled world’s seven billionth baby seems apt.  Uttar Pradesh, among the poorest regions of India, is known for its high rates of illiteracy, malnutrition and female foeticide.   By all counts, Nargis is lucky to be alive.  One can speculate about the rest of her life.  Her parents are probably already worried about the money they’ll have to cough up for her dowry and wedding.  If she goes to school at all, it will be for a few short years.  Much of her dreary childhood will be spent on cleaning, washing and cooking frugal meals for her struggling family, who will be pressed further into penury when the government appropriates their land to create a tax-exempt ‘special economic zone.’

Nargis will eat only when her brothers and elders are done.  She will marry, while still in her teens, to a man from a neighbouring village – a migrant worker, perhaps, who will return to his slum-squat in the city, leaving her for years of enslavement at the hands of her in-laws.  She will give birth to four girls, whose arrival she will lament, and two boys, who will break their backs to earn meagre wages, which they will spend on life’s bare necessities and their sisters’ marriages. Nargis is the face of a world under strain.  We imagine hers to be a wasted life, teetering on the edge of disease, destitution and death.  She is yet another mouth to feed, and she will beget only more.

In naming Nargis as the world’s seven billionth, Plan International has, surely, the best intentions.  It has tried to draw attention to the undervalued girl-child by announcing her birth under the spotlight of an international benchmark.  The UN has done the same. Its official selection for the symbolic seven billionth baby is Danica May Camacho, born to working class parents in Manila (Danica’s father is reportedly a driver, who supports his family on a tiny salary).

Picking children from struggling Third World families does seem a reasonable way to mark earth’s seven billion milestone.  Developing countries are adding staggering numbers of people to this planet, a trend that is set to continue.  In one year alone (2010-2011), Asia contributed 43 million to the world’s population, while Africa contributed 23.9 million.  India contributed the most in absolute terms, adding 16.9 million.   It is indeed quite likely that the world’s seven billionth was born to a maid in Mumbai, or a factory-worker in Mexico City, or a sharecropper in the interior of Ghana.

But insofar as most observers have identified the world’s high rate of population growth as a bad thing – nay, the primary affliction of our dystopian future – shining the light on Third World babies in our collective moment of dread is the wrong thing to do.   It frames our growing numbers, and all the privations that will supposedly follow, as a bitter scourge unleashed on the planet by its poor countries, and that too, by the poorest within them.  This all-too familiar racial Malthusianism conveniently exempts the world’s wealthy and privileged from scrutiny and responsibility.  If our “overcrowded” earth is on the brink of unquenchable want and ecological calamity, it is because corrupt, inept governments in remote, dark lands have failed to “control” or “manage” their overly fecund populations; it is due to “backward” cultures that nurture an irrational preference for the male child.

Certainly, developing country governments have much answer for.  India, a country that never misses an opportunity to boast of its “8-9 percent rate of economic growth,” can do a lot more to educate its women, so they have more of a say in when to marry and how many children to bear.  India can do far more to reduce poverty, create stable jobs, and provide citizens with rudimentary healthcare, so that children, born to the poor, are valued as vastly more than meal-tickets, spare hands and would-be nursemaids.

But what about the culpability of the so-called one percent? What is their role in our imminent doom and gloom?

Is not a rich, white, male child the more fitting emblem of our menacing future? The harbinger of many ghoulish times to come? It is said, after all, that an extra child born in the United States today, will, “down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra child in China, 55 times that of an Indian child or 86 times that of a Nigerian child” (this, according to a study by Paul Murtaugh of Oregon State University).

I, for one, imagine my seven billionth earthly compatriot to be a much-cherished child, born to affluent, ageing parents after several years on the IVF treadmill.  He is lovingly named John something-or-another-the-third, to honour a dead family patriarch.  John will lead a charmed life. He will eat well, excel in sports, and go to an expensive, private university, where he will study business, diplomacy and law.  He will travel on skiing holidays to slopes of pristine, powdery snow (not crowded at all), and to secluded tropical beaches that are cordoned off from pesky locals.  John will use his school ties to become an executive in a successful multinational firm, which, enabled by a new regime of free trade, will run a thousand small businesses to the ground.  John will own a cavernous, gas-guzzling car, and will fly around the world in massive jet planes, feasting on rare steak, ostrich and red wine.

Later in life, John will develop an entrepreneurial itch.  He will acquire a mining company that will bribe officials in a faraway place to illegally capture an expanse of mineral-rich land.  Hundreds of families will lose their livelihoods and be driven into a sullen shadow city on the peripheries of a looming megalopolis nearby.  The mining venture will make John a billionaire.  He will want to run for office, for which he will need a sellable platform.

In a world where the likes of Nargis and Danica are multiplying, he will correctly predict the wild success of an anti-immigration stance.  John will climb to the heights of power.  His sloganeering will be translated into legislation and policy, resulting in a spate of fresh restrictions, which will be used to confine yet another generation of hopeful migrants to their congested, filthy slum-worlds.  John will eventually spawn a son, who, after a few years of dissolute youth, will ease into his father’s empire, confident of his ability to improve the dying world, whose ills he will blame on the ungovernable breeding habits of the distant, anarchic poor.

Can I say – apocalypse, now?

(Mitu Sengupta is Associate Professor of Politics, Ryerson University, Canada, and Director for the Centre for Development and Human Rights (CDHR), New Delhi. She may reached at msengupta<at>gmail.com.)