Indias Gain Wests Loss

It was supposed to be our date with doom. The billionth Indian baby born onto an overcrowded sub-continent. A Malthusian Armageddon on a scale that Thomas Malthus could not have contemplated in his wildest back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Somehow, I find it tough to whip up Malthusian indignation about the birth of Astha Arora. Perhaps, its because I've been getting a slightly different perspective on the world from a hospital bed. I've just spent a week at London's Kingston Hospital courtesy of Britain's National Health Service.

Until I bedded down at Kingston General, Europe's ageing population was an awesome statistic. Last week, it became a reality before my own eyes.

Out of the six people in the ward, three were over 75. A fourth patient was a relatively sprightly 67. From one ward to another, it was the same depressingly aged picture. Around 70 per cent of Kingston's patients are over 70. One or two were wandering aimlessly from one ward to another chased by solicitous and overworked nurses. "It gets a bit difficult when they are confused," said one nurse.

This is only the beginning of pensioner power. The Baby Boom generation will start retiring in the next few years and that's when the real fun begins.

NHS hospitals will be filled with older patients who are living longer and there will be fewer income tax payers to underwrite it. One UN report reckons that the population in the European Union's 15 countries will drop from 375 million to 330 million by 2050.

Prosperity and the emancipation of women are creating the same results around the world. In Britain 25 per cent of all women have decided that it is impossible to combine child-rearing and a high-powered career. That's up from 19 per cent five years ago. In Australia couples without children will outnumber those with children in 16 years from now. In Italy the population will tumble 28 per cent to 41 million by 2050. The Japanese will be down by 17 per cent to 105 million in the next 50 years.

Combine these alarming figures with full-throttle economic growth and what do we get: an unquenchable thirst for immigrants. But where will they come from? The Koreans might once have exported manpower to Japan. But, now the Koreans themselves will need immigrants in a few years time. And, the Mexicans won't be able to satisfy the fast-growing needs of the American market. Even Alan Greenspan has admitted that the illegal immigrants are helping to keep wages and inflation under check.

So, it isn't surprising that the world is subtly changing its attitude to immigrants. The first signs of change is coming -- not surprisingly -- from the United States. The country's strongest union the AFL-CIO is now backing pro-immigrant moves. And Senator Lamar Smith, who has always opposed bigger quotas for immigrants, has now backtracked and is backing the newly-expanded programme for distributing H1-B visas.

Says London's Guardian newspaper colourfully: "Help wanted. Colour and nationality irrelevant. Immigration rules waived as necessary. Whoever you are the world is your hi-tech oyster." That is only the first step. "Today the Indian programmers in their 20s. Tomorrow, the fit and energetic who'll sustain the way of life we vote for automatically," says The Guardian.

The shrinking population has, until now, been a faraway and unimportant issue. But, suddenly it has turned into an attention-getter in recent weeks.

The Times argues that slow economic growth has masked the problem for many years in Europe. "This inexorable demographic change will make large-scale immigration inevitably eventually in every rich country, in order to support the cohorts of pensioners ..." says The Times.

So, which country has the bigger dilemma? Is it India where the billionth child has just been born? What about the other parts of the globe where the population is shrinking inexorably? Let's just say that I've seen the future and it doesn't work.