Population has always been a political issue, but when the new millennium officially unfolds in 2001, it promises to become irretrievably combustible if the country's current leadership doesn't turn proactive on the issue. Back in 1976, Indira Gandhi's Emergency dispensation had frozen the number of seats in Parliament and state legislatures at existing levels till 2001. It was meant to deny the more populous states anunfair political advantage. But with the 2001 Census round the corner, a `population imbalance', to quote the country's best-known demographer, Ashish Bose, stares us in the face. When the scramble for more seats in Parliament acquires a frenetic pace in 2001, the southern states will find themselves at the receiving end of the demographic stick, simply because they have been more diligent in striving towards a goal we set for ourselves in 1952.

Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh -- the BIMARU states, as Bose has so evocatively labelled them -- contributed 40 percent of the population, 42 percent of the population growth, and 48 percent of our illiterate population in the 1991 Census. The performance of these four states continues to be abysmal in the area of population control, what with each of them recording a crude birth rate way above the national average of 27.2 in 1997. Bihar's score was 31.7, Madhya Pradesh's 31.9, Rajasthan's 32.1, and Uttar Pradesh's 33.5. The point to note is thatthe national average itself was behind the Eighth Plan's modest target of 26. Now, compare these figures with those reported by the four southern states -- Kerala (17.9), Tamil Nadu (19), Andhra Pradesh (22.5) and Karnataka (22.7). Should these states be penalised politically for achieving the nation's key development objective? Will they end up with fewer seats in Parliament than the four basket cases of the North?

The future, too, appears to be bleak for the BIMARU states, if we take a peek at their lack of achievement in the critical area of contraception. Again, the national average is a laughable 45.6 percent of the 165 million eligible couples in the reproductive age group, which, after Rs 6,816 crore having been spent in the Eighth Plan, is light years behind the eminently achievable target of 56 percent. Still, Bihar could achieve only a measly protection rate of 20.9 percent as of March 31, 1998 (which, incidentally, was a year into the Ninth Plan); Rajasthan reported 34.6 percent and UttarPradesh, 39.1 percent. Only Madhya Pradesh bucked the trend with 47.7 per cent. These percentages would have been even less flattering, but for the boost provided to them by the preponderance of female sterilisation, which doesn't help anyone, for most women opt for the terminal method only after three or four children. Once more, the southern states are significantly ahead, with Karnataka achieving a contraception rate of 55.6 percent, Tamil Nadu 51.7 percent, Andhra Pradesh 46.9 percent, and Kerala 46.7 percent.

The big irony is that the southern states achieved their success story by spending Rs 1,000 crore less than their peers to the north of the Vindhyas. The Centre pumped Rs 2,255 crore as grants-in-aid into the BIMARU states in the Eighth Plan quinquennium, compared to Rs 1,264 crore given to the four southern states. It is not money, therefore, that is necessarily the engine of development, but a determination on the part of the political leadership to achieve the goals it sets for itself.Conspiracy theorists would impute motives to the utter failure of the BIMARU political leadership on the population front -- they would argue that the unstated agenda of cowbelt politicos is to stay ahead of the numbers game and thereby tighten their stranglehold on politics at the Centre, especially in these times of rainbow coalitions. A more charitable view would be that they are plain incompetent.

Whatever the reason may be, the southern states cannot be made to pay a steep political price for being development success stories. The only way the current balance in Parliament -- already tilted in favour of the North -- can be safeguarded from a further shift away from the South, is to continue with the freeze till the country achieves what demographers describe as the net reproduction rate (NRR) of one. When the country achieves that mark, which doesn't look likely in the foreseeable future, every married woman of child-bearing age will bear, on average, only enough daughters to replace themselves in thepopulation. An incentive, in fact, can be built into the freeze by including the proviso that it is to be lifted as soon as a state achieves an NRR of one. So, the earlier a state achieves an NRR of one, the quicker will its presence in both Houses of Parliament and the strength of its legislature go up.

There can only be a political solution to the new political equations that our phenomenally growing numbers are throwing up. New Delhi must pause to think about it before it sinks Rs 11,016.78 crore in the Ninth Plan into what is turning out to be a bottomless pit of imbalances.