Chapter 82 India's population explosion

From the Pakistan-India border to New Delhi, the actual distance is 500 kilometers.It takes about four and a half hours to drive this distance in China, but it took nine hours and forty minutes here, a little more than double. Before leaving, an old overseas Chinese in Lahore told us that rural India is poorer than Pakistan.But from our point of view, this is not the case, it is much better than Pakistan.If you take China as a comparison, the suffocating poverty that is thousands of kilometers long in the entire southern part of Pakistan, Sindh and Balochistan, is hard to find anywhere in China. At most, there are a few villages that are too remote in the northwest and southwest They are slightly similar; while these rural areas in India are similar to parts of northern Hebei and southern Jiangxi in China, except that the road improvement and sanitation conditions are quite different, and the crowds must be removed.

In India, whether you come to a village or a small town, you will really feel the horror of population explosion.I observed carefully in several small towns, and the basic composition of the densely packed crowd was roughly: 30% set up stalls, 10% begged, and 60% stood idle.What makes people feel crowded is firstly the 60% of people standing idle, rushing to where there is a small incident, making the weight of the population denser due to movement; secondly, the people who set up stalls, who do not respect order at all , just like a bookshelf fell to the ground, and at a glance, the number of books increased tenfold.

China is the most populous country in the world, and the Chinese seem to lack the qualifications to say that their population is exploding.But please think about it, India's land area is only one-third of China's, and its population has reached one billion. This density is beyond China's comparison. According to the calculations of the relevant departments of the United Nations, India's total population will exceed that of China in more than ten years, and the density of the average space will be more intense.The Chinese love their families, and they are still busy at home after retirement. Few people stand on the street all day long and wait to see what happens.Therefore, seeing the Indians at such a stop actually overwhelmed us Chinese from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, etc., which are also considered crowded cities.I really don't know how friends from America, Europe, and Australia will feel after watching it.

The population swells mainly among the poor.There are poor people everywhere, but the poverty of the poor in India has become a spectacle that is shocking to travelers from all over the world.Just within the 500 kilometers we passed, there were a large area of ​​shacks running close to the road.Each hut is half a meter to one meter high, and people can only climb in and out. It is so dark that it looks like it was built from garbage. This is a home. A Chinese scholar said that in the past, the Chinese said that a person was poor, at most he had a family with four walls, but the poor in India did not even have a wall.I once poked my head into those shacks and found that most of them consisted of a broken blanket on the floor, a small pile of clothes in the corner, and a small pot, but nothing else.According to statistics, the poor in India account for more than half, that is, 500 to 600 million people, but the poverty rate in some cities reaches 80%.The rapid growth of the population at such a standard of living cannot bear the consequences of a country or a nation.

The reflection of the century cannot escape the population problem.Taking China as an example, there were about 20 million at the beginning of AD, hundreds of millions in the seventeenth century, 300 million at the beginning of this century, and 1.2 billion at the end of this century. control.But just when China began to control its population, India's population increased by leaps and bounds. In the 1980s alone, the population increase was equivalent to the total population of Western Europe, and now it is increasing by more than 20 million per year.Since it took about ten years for India to become the most populous country in the world, we have to worry deeply at the turn of the century and the turn of the millennium: what will happen in a hundred years?What about after a thousand years?

The answer is very pessimistic.Because it has been proved that the population of all groups with a good level of economic education is sharply decreasing, and in those places where the population is exploding, all political parties will never involve the population issue because they are afraid of losing votes, and of course there is no effective way to talk about it. control measures. No matter what kind of civilization, when the black crowd rushes over with bare feet and naked bodies, it is nothing.The most primitive material requirements correspond to the most primitive religious worship. When the number of them was not too large, they had already overwhelmed many refined civilizations. When the number continued to increase countless times, what could not be overwhelmed?

I thought about it all the way, feeling sad.Turning to look out of the window, the vehicles on the road were driving very stupidly, only knowing that they were blocked, and no one would give way to anyone.Many cars are not equipped with reflectors, and even if they are installed, they are only a very small piece, which is almost used for shaving, and cannot reflect the condition of the car behind.Behind each car is written in large English characters: Honk!But when everyone honked their horns, they couldn't understand anything, and everyone's mood became bad amidst the din, and they all went on a rampage.

In a passenger car with many passengers, the elderly driver somehow wanted to tease us with its huge size, deliberately forced us to the side of the road, and finally smashed the side of the jeep I was sitting in. wiped.We hurriedly stopped to have a look, and saw that he had an indifferent face, as if running around like this was a normal pastime for his old man every day.At this moment, our No. 5 car was chased and hit by a speeding car. The light of the car was broken and the front of the car was sunken. Our car was not damaged at all. The car drove away leisurely without any complaints. Like a normal pastime.

The road is too narrow and the condition of the road surface is better than the roads in Pakistan, but not much better.So our whole convoy was stumbling and writhing, perpetually on edge, never going any faster.It was eleven o'clock in the evening when we arrived in New Delhi. New Delhi is big and has a bit of grandeur.Several three-dimensional traffic structures are cleverly designed, slightly better than Cairo and Tehran.Its main problem is air pollution. It seems that it has been covered with thick fog, the moon is hazy, and the birds are hazy.It is said that the most serious thing is water pollution. The amount of industrial waste water and urban waste water discharged into the Ganges is 900 million liters every day.

Rivers are the arteries of human civilization. This time we passed through a series of big rivers, from the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, to the Indus River in Pakistan. What we saw was poverty and war. The problem of pollution is not the most serious. Now It seems that the Ganges will set the highest record in this respect. December 14, 1999, New Delhi, India, overnight at Surya Hotel