In the poem The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost described the dilemma of standing at the intersection of two divergent paths. Both looked inviting, but he had to choose one. “I took the one less travelled by/And that has made all the difference,” he wrote.

Half a century ago, India and China stood at a similar point. Their fertility rates – at 5.6 and 5.5 children per woman – were neck and neck and way more than what is regarded as replacement level fertility of 2.1, at which the population stabilises. They also faced similar social and developmental challenges as they sought to build their nations after suffering the devastation of long colonial and imperial humiliations and war.

However, their journeys towards population control took vastly different routes, shaped by vastly different policies and approaches. Today, as India’s population passes China’s amid a mix of hope and apprehensions about its implications, it’s important to recall those journeys so societies and policymakers draw the right lessons from them.

Slow and steady India

India has been running its family planning programme since 1952 and chose to travel on a path that was slow, steady and winding. It provided reproductive health services, choices for couples on contraception and the freedom to decide how many children they wanted.

The strategy wasn’t an obvious success right away. The population growth rate increased initially, from 21.6 percent in 1961 to 24.8 percent in 1971, and the population rose from 439 million to 548 million, largely as the result of increased life expectancy — up from 45 to 49 years in that decade.

Frustration about these rising numbers was palpable. So much so that after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of national emergency in 1975 and suspended many civil liberties, the government used coercion to sterilise people, especially men.

With the lifting of the emergency in 1977, India returned to its old path focused on the provision of reproductive health and family planning services as the means to a stable population.

Under India’s federal structure, state governments set their own priorities with southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu emphasising socioeconomic development and women’s empowerment.

India’s population growth rate began to decline from 1981, a trend that continues. By 1991, India’s total fertility rate had declined to 4, falling to 3.3 by 2001 and 2.5 in 2011. Finally, in 2020, India achieved replacement-level fertility, a significant milestone in its demographic transition.

Fast but tumultuous China

As India was marking that momentous occasion in 2020, China was facing a population crisis very different from the one it was staring at in the 1970s. Its fertility rate had dropped so much that it was far below replacement levels at 1.3 and was forcing the country into a series of policy about-turns in the hope of actually increasing the birth rate as it faces the reality of an ageing society, a shrinking workforce and a slowing economy.

But how did China go from one extreme to the other?

Even though post-1948 Communist China has invested in infrastructure and health services in a major way, it was keen to achieve lower fertility fast. Very fast. In the 1970s, the country set new age limits for marriage: Women needed to be at least 23 years old and men 25. Couples in the cities were encouraged to delay marriages even more. The fertility rate plunged from 5.5 births per woman in 1971 to 2.7 births in 1979.

But that wasn’t enough for China. So in 1979, it brought in a one-child norm, fining couples who gave birth to two or more children. Additionally, forced sterilisations and abortions were also carried out in the zeal to achieve lower fertility.

The 1980s witnessed fluctuating fertility rates, mostly hovering slightly above the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. However, the early 1990s marked a turning point when fertility dropped below replacement level, and it has continued to decline since then.

China has now realised how that policy has backfired, leading to a skewed sex ratio of more men than women and a rapidly ageing population. It changed its policy in 2016 to let families have two children and raised the bar to three in 2021.

However, the decades-long punitive restrictions have interfered so fundamentally with the country’s demographics that the effects will not be easy to mitigate — leave alone reverse.  In 2022, for the first time in 60 years, China’s population shrunk — and by nearly a million people.

The road ahead

Today, India and China are poised to encounter very different demographic landscapes in the years ahead.

China is ageing rapidly. The proportion of its population that is older than 65 has almost doubled since the turn of the century from 7 percent to 13 percent. The country’s earlier restrictive policies have also created another legacy, a severe gender imbalance with 1,123 male births per 1,000 female births in 2020. Faced with these challenges, China will need innovative solutions to sustain economic growth and provide for the needs of the elderly.

Conversely, India’s youthful population – half of which is younger than 30 — offers tremendous opportunities for the country. Successive governments have invested in girls education and women’s social and economic empowerment instead of more draconian steps like the ones China previously adopted.

India’s development-centric approach is in keeping with the United Nations-organised International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, which called for making investments in people’s lives and discouraged coercion as a strategy to reduce fertility. Several Indian states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh achieved low fertility levels early, setting an example for others. India has additionally targeted 146 high-fertility districts in seven states with a series of initiatives from enhanced supplies of contraceptives to campaigns on family planning.

Still, India has an unfinished agenda. As its population continues to grow, its large young population is available to work and accelerate the country’s economic progress, but it needs to be educated and trained to do so.

India needs to make sure that it adapts its education and professional skills programmes to meet the needs of the job market. In the success of its youth lies India’s success.

India must also work towards leveraging its gender dividend, defined as the increase in economic growth that can be realised by greater investments in women and girls. According to recent data, China has among the world’s most skewed sex ratios at birth.

India’s sex ratio at birth was observed at 1,079 male births per 1,000 female births in 2020. Going forward, the country must invest in gender equality initiatives that focus on changing patriarchal norms with an invigorated focus on promoting secondary school education and female workforce participation.

The country must also plan ahead for an ageing population, putting in place social security systems and geriatric care facilities. Lessons from China underscore the need for an empowerment-based approach to population stabilisation with the interests of the people at the centre.

When former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa abruptly banned chemical fertiliser imports in mid-2021, he turned Sri Lanka into a case study for how not to do organic farming. The restrictions — which caught agricultural officials and farmers by surprise — sparked chaos in the agricultural sector. The lack of alternatives led to sharp drops in output, with harvests of rice and other crops falling. This, in turn, stoked a severe economic crisis, which culminated in the country’s default on $40bn in foreign debt last year. The once-fertile island is now dependent on food grants and imports to manage a hunger crisis. Even though Rajapaksa reversed the ban about six months later, fertiliser supplies in Sri Lanka never normalised. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 pushed up prices globally, while a lack of foreign currency in Sri Lanka led to severe shortages and rationing of imported fertiliser.

A bag of urea that cost Rs1,500 ($4.65) shot up to as much as Rs40,000 before falling to a subsidised price of Rs10,000 ($124), says Ahilan Kadirgamar, a sociologist at the University of Jaffna. Farm organisers and agricultural experts in Sri Lanka say that — even if many farmers have no intention of ever going “organic” again — the disruption to chemical fertiliser supplies has highlighted the importance of finding alternatives to help insulate them from future shocks. And a number of small-scale initiatives and pilots to explore those alternatives are now under way across the country. “What farmers are doing on the fertiliser front is they’re experimenting,” says Kadirgamar, who is also chair of a rural co-operative federation. “They’re trying to use less fertiliser, or a mix of organic compost and fertiliser, but there’s no sort of conclusive direction in terms of how they’re going to go forward.”

A Sri Lankan farmer works in a paddy field. Volatile prices for chemical fertilisers have spurred cautious interest in organic alternatives © Ishara S Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images Some of these schemes predate Rajapaksa’s fertiliser ban. Kadirgamar says that four co-operatives in Sri Lanka’s north started running small organic compost factories from 2018 onwards, using ingredients such as dried leaves and cow dung to create natural fertilisers. The idea was never to replace chemical fertilisers, Kadirgamar says, but to reduce dependence on them. He adds, however, that demand form alternatives is trending higher as farmers try to offset the high cost of fertiliser, and some co-operatives are considering producing more organic compost. “From the farmers’ point of view, it’s just about survival,” he says. While on the campaign trail to become president in 2019, Rajapaksa had railed against the dangers of chemical fertilisers to human health and the environment.

But few expected the import ban, which some critics say was motivated not by environmental concerns but by an ill-advised attempt to stem falling foreign currency reserves. If that was the aim, it failed, and the country’s bankruptcy fuelled mass protests that forced Rajapaksa out of office in July last year. The turmoil attracted worldwide attention, and was seen in some quarters as a cautionary tale about the risks of rethinking farming — with Tucker Carlson, then a host on Fox News in the US, calling Sri Lanka a “victim of ESG”. Farmers didn’t know how to do organic agriculture and they were seeing a drop in yield. Due to this experience, they don’t believe in organic agriculture Shamila Rathnasooriya, Monlar JM Soorasena, who grew up in a farming family and is now president of the country’s Agriculture and Environment Professional’s Cooperative Society, acknowledges Rajapaksa’s move was damaging for advocates of sustainable farming methods, like himself.

“They didn’t have any good plan, they didn’t have any infrastructure,” he says of the government, adding that officials still “don’t know how to practice” organic farming. Shamila Rathnasooriya, a co-ordinator with rural non-profit organisation Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (Monlar) says that, after the ban: “Farmers didn’t know how to do organic agriculture and they were seeing a drop in yield. Due to this experience, farmers don’t believe in organic agriculture.” Monlar is now trying to change that, and works with about 2,000 farmers across the country to teach them alternative farming methods. It distributes seeds for crops such as suwandel, an indigenous variety of rice, and green gram or vegetables that Rathnasooriya says are well suited to the country’s climate. It then trains farmers in organic farming methods such as preparing jeevamrutham, a fertiliser made from cow dung, cow urine, sugar and flour that is used in neighbouring India. Rathnasooriya says Monlar encourages participants to start by testing the techniques on half an acre of their land, and to expand it if they see good results.

If successful, he says, farmers enjoy a “similar amount of harvest, and they see the multiplication and improvement of micro-biodiversity”. Ultimately, though, these efforts remain small scale. Kadirgamar says there is little sign that industrialised agricultural businesses in Sri Lanka are following suit, even if the ban also showed “they need to be much more careful in [fertiliser] use”. Either way, Soorasena says the future of fertilisers in Sri Lanka will be tied not to sustainability, but to politics. With nearly a third of the country’s workforce engaged in agriculture, subsidising chemical fertilisers is a useful vote winner, he argues. “It’s not economical, but political.”

FINANCIAL TIMES

1. State Minister of Finance Ranjith Siyambalapitya says the Govt will announce its debt restructuring strategy in May: laments the debt to GDP has risen to 128%, but will be brought down to 95% in 5 years, after imposing massive haircuts: according to the CBSL Annual Report 2022, “Debt to GDP” was 91% in 2005 and brought down to 69% by 2014, but jumped again to 81% by 2019.
2. IMF Asia & Pacific Dept Director Krishna Srinivasan says debt in Sri Lanka was assessed to be “unsustainable” by the IMF and that’s why there had to be a path towards restoring debt sustainability before the IMF programme could be approved: confirms that includes restructuring debt to all creditors – private, official, and to some extent, domestic: however, CB Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe had been consistently insisting that local debt will not be re-structured.
3. Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera expresses regret that only 2 MPs have submitted ideas and proposals in relation to the proposed Agriculture Policy: laments over the MPs’ lack of interest in the Policy.
4. Director of Primary Health Services of the Ministry of Health Dr Priyantha Atapattu says 350 doctors have left the country over the past 9 months, without Ministry approval: also says 2,837 specialist doctors and 23,000 doctors are required for the country.
5. Vietnamese Buddhist monks residing in Sri Lanka bring down decorations from Vietnam to showcase at the Vesak zone 2023 organized by the Gangarama Temple, Hunupitiya.
6. Public Health Inspectors’ Union Chairman Upul Rohana says at least 7,160 “dansal” have been registered in view of the Vesak festival: also says all dansal, registered and unregistered, will be monitored by PHIs on Vesak Day and the following day to ensure hygiene and public safety for which 3,000 Inspectors will be deployed.
7. CB says its Official Reserve Assets increased by USD 61 mn (2.2%) to USD 2,755 mn in April’23 from USD 2,694 million in March’23: also says the reserve includes SWAP from People’s Bank of China of USD 1.4 bn, which had been previously ignored by former Finance Minister Sabry when announcing the Reserves level in Parliament.
8. Ceylon Teachers’ Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin says even though the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations had requested the President for a discussion regarding the issues relating to the scrutiny of GCE A/L answer scripts, the President has left the country without giving them an appointment: also says the issues relating to the scrutiny of A/L answer scripts have gone from bad to worse.
9. Colombo Stock Market makes a modest gain from its 3-month low, but turnover slumps to an abysmal low of Rs.252 mn.
10. Former NZ star Scott Styris says Sri Lanka’s pacer with the slinging action Matheesha Pathirana has the ability to bowl at quicker speeds than the legendary Lasith Malinga: because of Pathirana’s pin-point yorkers and accuracy in the death overs, the 20-year-old pacer has emerged as a rising star for Chennai Super Kings in the IPL and has drawn attention from all over the world.

As Sri Lanka celebrates the Vesak festival on a grand scale this year, the Sri Lanka Police have announced a special traffic plan in the city of Colombo. The festival, which marks the birth, enlightenment, and Parinirvana of Gautama Buddha, is being celebrated with renewed enthusiasm after subdued celebrations for the past four years due to the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic crisis.

To facilitate the people visiting the Vesak zones established in many parts of Colombo, including Bauddhaloka Mawatha and Gangaramaya Temple, the police have designated specific areas for parking vehicles. However, the members of the public are advised not to park their vehicles on the main roads, byroads, or pavements that block the movement of traffic. Those who do so will face fines and their vehicles may be removed.

With this traffic plan in place, the Sri Lanka Police aim to ensure the safety and convenience of the public during the Vesak festival celebrations in Colombo.

Parking space for Gangarama Budddha Rashmi Vesak Zone:
• Union Place – from Kompannaveediya Junction to Ibbanwala Junction
• Dharmapala Mawatha – from Hunupitiya Crossroad to F.R. Senanayake Mawatha
• F.R. Senanayake Mawatha – from Dharmapala Mawatha to Kannangara Mawatha
• Vauxaull Street

Parking space near Bauddhaloka Mawatha Vesak Zone:
• Maitland Place car park
• Independence Mawatha
• Vidya Mawatha
• Sarana Road
• R.G. Senanayake Mawatha

Parking space near Galle Face Green:
• Car park where the old Defence Ministry building

The Department of Meteorology has issued a warning to the public about severe weather conditions in several areas of Sri Lanka. According to the department, parts of Eastern, Central, and Uva provinces and Mullaitivu and Polonnaruwa districts may experience showers or thundershowers, particularly in the afternoon or at night.

In addition, Western, Sabaragamuwa, and Southern provinces, as well as Jaffna and Puttalam districts, are expected to see several spells of showers. Strong winds of about 40-50 kmph can also be expected at times over western and southern coastal areas.

The public is urged to take adequate precautions to minimize damages caused by temporary localized strong winds and lightning during thundershowers. The department has also issued a warning to fishing and naval communities to be attentive to future forecasts, as a low-level atmospheric disturbance is likely to develop over the southeast Bay of Bengal area from May 06 onwards.

In sea areas around the island, showers or thundershowers are expected to occur at several places, with south-westerly winds of (25-35) kmph. The wind speed may increase up to 40-50 kmph at times in the sea areas off the coast extending from Beruwala to Hambantota via Galle and Matara. The sea areas off the coast extending from Beruwala to Hambantota via Galle and Matara will be fairly rough at times, while the other sea areas around the island will be slight to moderate.

The department has warned that temporarily strong gusty winds and very rough seas can be expected during thundershowers. The public is advised to stay updated on the weather conditions and take necessary precautions to ensure their safety and minimize damage to property.

The Sri Lankan film industry is mourning the loss of veteran actor Gnananga Gunawardena, who passed away on May 04 at the age of 78. According to sources, the actor was undergoing treatment at the Colombo National Hospital when he breathed his last.

With a career spanning several decades, Gunawardena had made a significant contribution to the Sri Lankan film industry. He kickstarted his acting journey with the movie ‘Hewanali Ada Minissu’ in 1980, directed by Parakrama de Silva. He went on to act in many popular movies, including ‘Saptha Kanya’ (1993), ‘Seilama’ (1995), ‘Tharanaya’ (1997), and ‘Maharaja Ajasath’ (2015), among others.

The funeral arrangements for Gunawardena have been announced. His body will be kept at a private funeral parlour in Borella from 8.30 a.m. tomorrow, after which the final rites will be performed at 3.00 p.m. on Saturday (May 06).

As news of his passing spread, fans and fellow actors took to social media to express their condolences and pay their respects to the veteran actor. His demise is a great loss to the Sri Lankan film industry, and his contributions to the art form will be remembered for years to come.