We hear so much propaganda from government and media that India is over populated. But is it really overpopulated? A country being overpopulated or not — and its degree of overpopulation — can be measured by seeing its physiological population density.
What is Physiological Density of population?
The physiological density or real population density is the number of people per unit area of arable land. A higher physiological density suggests that the available agricultural land is being used by more people and may reach its output limit sooner than a country that has a lower physiological density.
So the countries in the list which have a worse physiological density than India but have a better standard of living (excluding oil-exporting countries) are:
- Singapore (this can be excluded as a small trade-oriented country)
- Iceland – 4,229/sq.km of arable land
- South Korea – 2,998/sq.km of arable land
- Taiwan – 2,932/sq.km of arable land
- Japan – 2,924/sq.km of arable land
- Netherlands – 2,205/sq.km of arable land
- Israel – 2,147/sq.km of arable land
- Colombia – 2,064/sq.km of arable land
- Switzerland – 1,900/sq.km of arable land
- Costa Rica – 1,803/sq.km of arable land
- Malaysia – 1,336/sq.km of arable land
- Belgium – 1,248/sq.km of arable land
- Slovenia – 1,170/sq.km of arable land
- United Kingdom – 1,077/sq.km of arable land
- China – 943/sq.km of arable land
- Liechtenstein – 843/sq.km of arable land
- Luxembourg – ~750/sq.km of arable land
- Italy – ~750/sq.km of arable land
Note: Oil exporters like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Venezuela are excluded to avoid the confounding variable of oil wealth. Countries only marginally better than India like Indonesia and Sri Lanka (which is better than India despite fighting a civil war) are also not included.
So is it right to blame our under-development on our population when clearly, countries much more overpopulated than us have succeeded much better economically and socially?
All our ills are caused by the misgovernance of five decades of Congress rule and their misplaced socialistic economic policies. Population was just a bogey to hide the incompetence of the Nehru clan and its bad socialist policies. To be frank, we would have remained underdeveloped even if we had only a population of 2 crore instead of the present 125 crore — while we can thrive even with 300 crore population if we utilise our potential to the maximum through capitalism, just like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Belgium and others with similar population density are thriving. It is about time we stopped blaming population for our ills and looked at our economic policies — which was the actual reason we are poor.