What distinguishes South Asia from other regions?
Of course, many aspects of wondrous culture traditions and
physical environment. But the one that I would want to
underscore is the extraordinary population density
of South Asia. Consider India, with its 1.2 billion
people out of 7.2 billion people total in the planet.
That's roughly 15% of the world's population,
yet India has just 2.5% of the world's land area.
And many parts of that land mass of India are very dry, or even desert.
Have a look at the map of population density where countries are shaded
according to their population density. And you see that India and
its next door neighbor, Bangladesh are indeed shaded as two of the
most densely populated parts of the world. The
numbers indeed are quite staggering. Bangladesh has on average
1,200 people per square kilometer, India about
410 people per square kilometer. The United States by
contrast has about 32
people per square kilometer. And so, the population density
in India is more than 10 times higher than in
the United States. And the implications of this throughout
India's history have been adverse. Indian farms are very,
very small.
Indian farmers traditionally have been able to grow only a small amount of food.
And have eked out an existence of poverty
in the thousands of Indian villages from time immemorial.
The cities, too are extraordinarily dense and
crowded as India's and South Asia's cities more
generally have increased. Many people thought the situation was
hopeless for South Asia looking in the 1950s and 1960s.
They said population is already so large and it continues to rise.
India and its neighbors don't have a chance to feed itself.
People forecast that there would
be mass dying from mass starvation. Bangladesh, when it gained independence
in the early 1970s [COUGH] was notoriously called a basket case, absolutely hopeless.
Now thank goodness this has not proven to be the case.
And indeed India has been one of the best economic performers in recent years.
And it has taken a pride of place as one of the leaders of the information
technology revolution with wonderful engineering wonderful
innovation in using information technology for economic development.
And through IT it has become integrated into the whole world economy.
Often in cutting-edge
industries using information technology with great programming
and systems developed by India's engineers, some of the world's finest.
How did this happen?
How did India avoid the fate that was so widely predicted for it?
Well there we have to start naturally with
agriculture, because once again India was overwhelmingly a
small holder, peasant society living in villages and living in poverty.
It was a great breakthrough in technology that enabled India
to begin this lift off into sustained rapid economic growth.
And that breakthrough in technology has been given
a famous name that is the green revolution.
The revolution in crop yields that really started in Mexico and
India in the 1950s, and then has spread to most of the developing
countries, still to be enjoyed by Sub-Saharan Africa.
What is the Green Revolution?
Well the Green Revolution starts with the individual pictured here a great hero
of mine, Norman Borlaug. A Nobel Peace Prize winner
who, as a highly skilled agronomist, a seed breeder,
using his great ingenuity developed high-yield
seed varieties for wheat, working in Mexico in the
1940s and the 1950s. Norman Borlaug was invited
to India in the early 1960s. His counterpart was another absolutely
wondrous a, agronomist pictured here, another hero of mine, M S Swaminathan.
The two of them took seeds that Norman Borlaug had developed for Mexican
conditions and planted them in Indian soils and Indian conditions.
First year didn't work out that well. They looked again.
They decided on a different approach The second year proved that lo and
behold, Mexico's varieties developed by Borlaug for Mexican
conditions worked beautifully in the Indian conditions.