Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
India
A country of subcontinental size, India is comparable to Argentina, but its
demographic parameters are quite different, with 900 million inhabitants, a
growth rate over 2 per cent annually (Argentina 1.2 per cent), infant mortality of
79 per thousand (Argentina 29), illiteracy at 52 per cent versus 5 per cent, and its
rural population 74.5 per cent of the total, against Argentina's 14 per cent rural.
The degree of concentration of population in one city is also much less. The
population of Calcutta, is 13.3 million, but this only represents 5.8 per cent of the
urban population.
This republic emerged in 1947 alongside Pakistan as the inheritor of
British India, a large country with an already massive population and difficulties
in feeding this population. Compared with Argentina's 16 million people in 1947,
India had 360 million in 1950, with only a little more land (3.1 million km
2
versus 2.8 million km
2
for Argentina). Much of this population was rural, so that
while Argentina was already mostly urban, with a huge concentration of 5
million people in its metropolitan area, India was over 80 per cent rural. It has
urbanized only very gradually since then. Population and its growth is a major
check to any developmental process in this country, as in India there is no leeway
of extra food resources or exportable materials to feed a suddenly growing
population as the demographic transition starts. Modernizing pressures, in a
country with limited resources and a dense rural population, can produce
powerful negative effects in the environment. Although the matter will not be
pursued in regard to this country, India is known (see Barke & O'Hare 1991) to
represent well the environmental damage problems likely when more production
from the land is required in an intensive farming system. Desertification affects
substantial areas of the Deccan plateau, and deforestation and erosion/
sedimentation are having startling effects in the forests of the Himalayan
foothills.
Socially, the structure was perhaps less polarized than that of Argentina, but it
also included an elite that emerged partly during the colonial times. Under
British rule, the domestic elite had been intermediaries between the governing
country and the governed Indians, acting in local government, English-speaking,
and generally well-educated. In contrast to India in general, they had only limited
links to the land.
There were two visions of India at independence. On the one hand was
Gandhi's vision of a grass-roots level of organization, each village having some
autonomy, each sharing its wealth in communal form amongst the members,
through the agency of a
panchayat
or village council. Opposing this was Nehru's
idea of modernizing development, neither the communism of China or Russia
nor the open capitalism of the West. It involved heavy state intervention to
promote and manage industrialization, since the private sectors, the great
capitalists, could not be trusted to do this fairly.
