Hi Walter,

           I must accept that you people have done more research on Indian population trends than we Indians have done!  Well, what you say is correct.  Particularly the graphs section and the discussion. The most noticeable problems Indians are facing "right now" are :

1. The lack of care for elderly (either from the young, or from government; to a large extent feminism is responsible for that)
2. The increasing male unemployment rate and increasing female employment rate (particularly for their first jobs after studies). You seldom find men getting placed well in their first jobs, whereas it is the opposite for women. Men often have to fight out from low paying jobs, and finally end up getting decently paying jobs in 4-5 years (on an average, as I have observed among our friends), whereas it is different in the case of women. Women usually get recruited for decent paying jobs via a very biased "campus selection" in colleges. That has been noticed by many students in different universities, though a lot of work has been done by the media to hide the fact.
3. Increasing tendency among couples not to have children these days.  Having seen the fate of their elderly counterparts, they usually decide not to have children.
4. Clearly evident increase in difficulty to raise families these days, as compared to earlier (at least 10 years ago).
5. Clearly evident increase in difficulty to meet the basic needs of individuals (or families) these days, as compared to what it was at least 10 years ago. [See note]
   
              For example, I have been brought up in a proper family atmosphere. My mother played a very important role in running the family, though she had many differences with my father. She used to take care of each and every thing starting, from household items to taxes. Running a family was very easy for my father, because all that he had to do was to just earn money from his job.  Also, the inflation was not so high, so my education and that of my brothers went very cheap as compared to today's rates. My education (Bachelor of Engineering), for example, took Rs 6,000 /year in 1996-2000, whereas now the same degree would cost (Rs 37,000 /year) from the same university (remember, here too girls get free education until school completion).
6. Increasing number of children being separated from their families at very young age (particularly men), in search of jobs, causing more stressed lives
7. Finally, the big devil - MEDIA. One very interesting process that has started here is that there is a very clear dividing line (very clear - I mean it), between individuals (and families) who are "bothered" about what is being said in the biased news channels, and those who are not the least bothered.  Generally, people from the higher income class are more avid TV watchers and news listeners than those from lower income classes.  Those who have seen the face of the problem and know the media for what it is usually just follow what Gandhi said long back, namely - See no evil, Hear no evil and Speak no evil.  Yes he was right, very right.  Action is more important than botheration and talk. I learnt it from your website too. Thanks for the information.

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If you would like to discuss those issues with Suchindra Chandrahas, .

My Note (WHS):

I am a conservative and neither Marxist nor communist, but just yesterday I ran across a statement from a Marxist source in India that illustrates the trend of the increasing difficulty for poor families in India to meet the basic necessities of life.  From that source:

....at the end of the decade, in 1999-2000, 74.5 percent of the rural population was poor, precisely in the sense that the rural poor are officially defined, viz. with a calorie intake of less than 2400 per person per day. (This figure is arrived at without making any adjustments to the “contaminated” NSS data; adjustments would raise it farther). In 1973-74 the corresponding figure was 56.4 percent. Rural poverty, in the strict sense defined by the central government itself, appears to have increased, or at the very least not declined, despite the significant acceleration in growth rate. (The decline shown by the Planning Commission is methodologically faulty: it updates a “poverty line” by using the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers which only partially covers the consumption basket of the labourers).

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Source: A BACKGROUND NOTE ON THE APPROACH PAPER TO THE ELEVENTH FIVE YEAR PLAN; People's Democracy, Vol. XXX, No. 29, July 16, 2006

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