-
(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
India's population passes 1.4 billion — and that's not a bad thing
India is now the world's most populous2 nation with 1.486 billion people, passing China in April according to projections3 by the United Nations. And it's still growing.
The sheer numbers might bring to mind images of city streets choked with automobiles4 and pedestrians5, of commuter7 train cars with passengers packed in right up to the doors — and of food shortages and environmental destruction.
Indeed, for decades, India ran massive public health campaigns to slow down the population growth. At times they resorted to coercive measures to sterilize8 men and women.
But the population boom is no longer necessarily seen as a population bomb.
"I think with India, the story has to be, what will India do with its population?" says Jennifer Sciubba, a scholar at the Wilson Center and author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration9 Shape our World.
"We've got this 1.4 billion people in India, and it's up to India to decide whether or not that becomes a resource or a burden."
With about a sixth of the world's eight billion people living in India, some people do still worry about overpopulation. But the country's perspective on population growth has shifted markedly. That's in part because the rate of growth has fallen dramatically in recent decades.
"India's total fertility has reached replacement10 levels, which means that two children replace two parents," says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India.
And in fact, she says, having a large young population can be seen as an "advantage."
People are increasingly optimistic that this large cohort of young people will drive further economic growth. But it all depends on how the country manages its own immensity.
Why there's been fear of overpopulation
India's harsh population control measures of the past were often backed by research and funding from the West, and often targeted the poor and marginalized.
"We see throughout time that those of the upper classes, those of the elite11, being very concerned that those poorer members of society were having so many children that they could not feed and care for them adequately," says Sciubba.
She and other scholars say that is still where much of the alarm over overpopulation comes from.
"I think the fear of India's population is probably larger in the West than in India itself," says Sonalde Desai, a demographer12 at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies India's population changes.
That said, India is still trying to figure out how to turn growth into prosperity for everybody – how to ensure the coming generation gets the education, employment, access to healthcare and amenities13 for a better life.
Population is "sort of the elephant in the room," says Mukta Naik, an urban planner and a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. "We have all these people. And they need to be safe. They need to have safety nets. They need to find livelihoods14."
India is also starting to reckon with the environmental pressures of such a large population on a rapidly urbanizing landscape. But in contrast with the population control efforts of the past, Indian lawmakers are starting to pursue more nuanced policies toward the country's changing demographics, looking for a more sustainable path to improving lives and livelihoods.
The youth are the future ... but with a caveat15
Indian leaders had previously16 assumed that just having a large population of young people would help boost its economy, says Muttreja.
"Now, India's realized that doesn't happen automatically," she says, "and it will have to invest in our young people."
Recent data show that unemployment levels have been rising in the country. Youth in urban areas in particular are struggling to find jobs.
One way the country is trying to build a more skilled workforce17 is by creating opportunities for its youth abroad. In 2021, India signed an agreement with Japan to allow Indian professionals in certain fields such as nursing, construction, agriculture and fisheries to work in Japan as "specified18 skilled workers" and further advance their technical skills in the process.
Other efforts have focused on creating opportunities locally. Many of India's smaller cities have set up startup incubation centers, says Naik, providing mentorship, work space and connections. And each city is building on what it already has in terms of industries and local expertise19, she says.
For example, Indore, a large city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has a track record of exceling in cleanliness and waste management. And so, startups there are working on sustainable technology solutions such as ways to turn trash into fuel, or technologies to clean up and reuse wastewater, says Naik.
Similarly, she says, a smaller town that's an agricultural hub might have startups focused on agricultural processing. "It's less sort of tech-heavy, but more what the city or what the region needs."
Big cities vs. smaller cities
For decades, India's big metropolises20 have drawn21 millions of people from the country's villages and small towns. But as the environmental costs of those megacities become clearer, India has shifted its policies to encourage development in smaller towns and cities.
Air pollution and rising urban heat levels are taking a big toll22 on people's health. Cities like New Delhi have depleted23 groundwater reserves.
"It's fairly clear that cities like Mumbai and Delhi are extremely crowded," says Desai. "Real estate prices are very high. Sustaining a quality of life in the cities is increasingly quite difficult."
The COVID-19 pandemic threw a spotlight24 on the precarious25 existence of these cities' most vulnerable inhabitants — millions of seasonal26 migrant workers, who lost their livelihoods and were compelled to flee back home. Many died from exhaustion27 while walking home on foot or while hitchhiking. Thousands were reported to have been killed in railway accidents while walking home along railway tracks.
The crisis pushed policymakers to think more about "how to help people in different pockets of India so that you don't have cities feeling overstretched and cramped28 out and you don't have people leaving smaller towns and rural areas," says Desai.
Some of that work is underway, says Naik, with a shift toward promoting development in smaller cities and towns.
For example, the Smart Cities Mission, launched by the federal government in 2015, aims to help 100 smaller cities across the country develop better infrastructure29, technology, municipal facilities and sustainable environmental solutions.
Another program aimed at improving living conditions in small cities and towns is the Pradhan Mantri Abhas Yojana, says Naik. It's a program that gives beneficiaries money for home improvement, which she says has helped many families who only had a "dilapidated" structure for a home transform it into something bigger and stronger.
Programs like this have had a "cascading30 effect" on families, says Naik, especially for people with connections to nearby rural areas. It allows them to host relatives from villages looking for a better source of income in the city. It also allows families the option to rent a part of their home to young people from rural areas getting an education or looking for jobs.
"So you see that there is a lot of mobility31, but it's not necessarily migration," says Naik.
Another factor that has eased population movement is investment in better roads and transportation in rural areas, where the bulk of India's population still lives, says Desai.
"We have found that [in] the villages which provide better road infrastructure and bus service, people are more likely to commute6 to nearby towns and work rather than migrate away to big cities," she says.
Indian leaders may not overtly32 connect these policies to the country's population, says Naik, but the effect they have is to spread the benefits more equitably33 across India's vast landscape.
However, the country still has a long way to go to turn those smaller urban areas into cleaner and more sustainable alternatives to a megacity. Most of the smaller town and city governments do little in terms of providing services, says Naik's colleague Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research.
"Municipal capacity in India is very poor," he says. "Cities do little else than pick up the trash and most of them don't do that very well."
They will have to do much more, Mukhopadhyay says, to make these places liveable in the long run.
In the meantime, research that he and his colleagues are doing shows that people in India's villages and small towns are increasingly staying closer to home and family, giving many of them a shot at a better life.
收听单词发音 |
1
transcript
|
|
| n.抄本，誊本，副本，肄业证书 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
populous
|
|
| adj.人口稠密的，人口众多的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
projections
|
|
| 预测( projection的名词复数 )； 投影； 投掷； 突起物 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
automobiles
|
|
| n.汽车( automobile的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
pedestrians
|
|
| n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
commute
|
|
| vi.乘车上下班；vt.减(刑)；折合；n.上下班交通 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
commuter
|
|
| n.(尤指市郊之间)乘公交车辆上下班者 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
sterilize
|
|
| vt.使不结果实；使绝育；使无效；杀菌，消毒 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
migration
|
|
| n.迁移，移居，（鸟类等的）迁徙 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
replacement
|
|
| n.取代，替换，交换；替代品，代用品 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
elite
|
|
| n.精英阶层；实力集团；adj.杰出的，卓越的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
demographer
|
|
| n.人口统计学家 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
amenities
|
|
| n.令人愉快的事物；礼仪；礼节；便利设施；礼仪( amenity的名词复数 )；便利设施；（环境等的）舒适；（性情等的）愉快 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
livelihoods
|
|
| 生计，谋生之道( livelihood的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
caveat
|
|
| n.警告； 防止误解的说明 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
previously
|
|
| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
workforce
|
|
| n.劳动大军，劳动力 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
specified
|
|
| adj.特定的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
expertise
|
|
| n.专门知识(或技能等)，专长 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
metropolises
|
|
| n.一国的主要城市（不一定是首都）( metropolis的名词复数 )；中心；大都会；大城市 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
drawn
|
|
| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
toll
|
|
| n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
depleted
|
|
| adj. 枯竭的, 废弃的 动词deplete的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
spotlight
|
|
| n.公众注意的中心，聚光灯，探照灯，视听，注意，醒目 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
precarious
|
|
| adj.不安定的，靠不住的；根据不足的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
seasonal
|
|
| adj.季节的，季节性的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
exhaustion
|
|
| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
cramped
|
|
| a.狭窄的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
infrastructure
|
|
| n.下部构造，下部组织，基础结构，基础设施 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
cascading
|
|
| 流注( cascade的现在分词 )； 大量落下； 大量垂悬； 梯流 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
mobility
|
|
| n.可动性，变动性，情感不定 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
overtly
|
|
| ad.公开地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
equitably
|
|
| 公平地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
购买
在百度中搜索