Barkha Dutt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Will India eventually become underpopulated, and it will be quite an old country before it’s ever truly rich, and have an inverse-pyramid problem of supporting everyone if that’s the case? We’ve often been told our people, our demographics are our dividend and not our weakness. I think both of those narratives are somewhat simplistic. I don’t think we are ever going to go the China way, where China’s now having to reverse its one-child policy. I think the reason that we are never going to go the China way is because, up until this point — and once briefly in the ’70s when Indira Gandhi’s son tried to enforce a population control program — we have never had the state force punishments for people who have more than X number of children. I hope we continue to follow the progressive approach to family planning and population management that we have, where people, on their own, are understanding that they should not be adding, certainly, more than two children to the demographics. So, no, I don’t think we are going to ever be in that position where you’re going to have the reverse problem. I think we’re steady on this. What concerns me more is the set of proposed legislations that now seeks to actually have a kind of enforced system of family planning, which I oppose. I oppose it mostly because — again, to go back to that misogyny that we were talking about — it will actually end up penalizing women who are often denied the right, let’s say, to access contraception and sometimes the rights to it, as well, in relationships that are not fully equal in the bedroom. Many outsiders have the impression that relations between Hindus and Muslims and the aggregate in India have become worse over the last 10 to 15 years. If you put aside particular actions of particular political personalities, and you try to think of a structural reason why that might be true — because normally the intuition is, people grow richer, they’re more tolerant, there’s more commercial interaction, there’s more intermingling — what would be your structural account of why, in some ways, that problem has become worse?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.