Full disclosure: I feel sort of awkward drawing attention to this story. It describes one of the most unsettling and simply bizarre state initiatives I’ve heard of in a while, and I’m not entirely sure the matter merits space on this site. Alas, my provocative side gets the best of me sometimes and I am compelled to link to it, if only because it’s consistent with the problems I promised to raise yesterday, not to mention it’s pertinent to India and that it points to some of the truly hard questions we as a global population will have to ask ourselves in the coming century. These questions bear spiritual, physical, cultural, and ethical import, and how we answer them…well, that’s just more than I can deal with in this format. 

Okay, so now I’ve overplayed it, but the fact remains that this story put me off when I read it this morning, and I’ve been thinking about it since. The thrust of it was best put in the subtitle of an article in Friday’s Telegraph:

Health officials in India are offering attractive incentives including a car, motorcycles and television sets to men and women who volunteer for sterilisation in a bid to control the country’s surging population.

Stephen Messenger at Treehugger does a pretty good job of drawing out the environmental impetus of the policy, but the ultimate dilemma he considers–“whether we can bribe our way out of more crowded world”– seems to me secondary to a more important one: whether we want to. Or put differently, whether we’re ready to.

Granted, the initiative aims at attracting only 30,000 Indians, a statistical mole hill to the mountain that is India’s population. And this is a policy far removed from the more (in)famous ones imposed in a certain nation to the north. Nevertheless, it points to changing attitudes in this country, and perhaps across the globe, about the ethics of procreation, and a massive shift in the conversation about how meaningful sustainability can be attained.

It so happens that last week I had a brief conversation with Robin, the Experience Desk Manager at Cardamom County, about precisely this problem. I asked him if he knew of any proposed government policies restricting human breeding (‘human breeding’ is crass, I know, but isn’t this what ‘sterilization’ connotes?), or if regular Indian citizens even discussed these things. He responded to the idea with a veritable scoff.

Last year, Hans Rosling gave a TED talk about the relationship between education, economic development, and sustainable population levels. The choice quote: “I’m not an optimist. Neither am I pessimist. I’m a very serious ‘possibilist.’ It’s a new category where we take emotion apart and just work analytically with the world.” And this does seem precisely the mode of thinking required to think about population on a macro- level.

Because there’s no doubt that burgeoning population rates are a serious threat to the Earth’s environment. And how my generation comes to think about having kids might determine how successful we are at effecting the environmental change many of us claim to desire. But the very human question remains to be answered:

Are we, as a species, as people, as ethical beings, willing to pass on children, especially for a new television set?

By the way, I promise to post something more uplifting tomorrow. I just couldn’t shake this story.