Too many of us, and not enough of everything else

There is a game Bangladeshis play every morning without knowing they are playing it. It is called getting from point A to point B. The rules are simple: you need to reach a destination, and so does everyone else. There are not enough buses, not enough roads, not enough seats, not enough air, and certainly not enough patience. You will arrive late. You will arrive sweaty. You will arrive having reconsidered several of your life choices. Congratulations. You have just experienced, in miniature, the defining condition of this country.

Bangladesh is home to approximately 178 million people squeezed into 147,570 square kilometres of land, giving us a population density five times higher than any other nation of comparable size. Dhaka, the capital city into which the entire country appears to be slowly pouring, exceeds 45,000 people per square kilometre in some pockets. Two thousand more arrive every single day. They come looking for work, for school, for a future. What they find, more often than not, is a shared room in a building that should house half as many people, and a city whose infrastructure was not designed for this century, let alone the next.

The remarkable thing about overpopulation as a crisis is that it hides in plain sight. We see it in the hospital queue, where the doctor has seventeen minutes to see forty patients and manages it by not fully seeing any of them. We see it in the classroom, where sixty children sit in a room designed for thirty, learning half as much in twice the noise. We see it in the job market, where a single government post attracts thousands of applicants, each holding a degree whose value has been diluted by the sheer volume of people holding identical degrees. The country produces two million new members of the labour force every year. The economy, politely but firmly, cannot absorb them all.

It is tempting to treat each of these as separate problems. The traffic problem needs more flyovers. The hospital's problem needs more doctors. The unemployment problem needs more industries. This is a bit like treating a flood by buying more mops. The water is still coming in. The source of the water is us.

And yet the source is almost never discussed. Policymakers talk endlessly about poverty, unemployment, climate, and infrastructure, every one of which is made dramatically worse by population pressure, without once connecting the dots. The topic is too sensitive, too entangled in religion and colonial memory to be spoken plainly. And so it is not spoken. Isaac Asimov called this, with characteristic precision, a conspiracy of silence. Half a century later, the conspiracy holds.

Bangladesh has done something genuinely remarkable over the past fifty years: the total fertility rate has fallen from nearly seven children per woman in 1971 to approximately 2.4 today. The problem is that 178 million people is the result of this success. The consequences of the decades before it are still very much with us, encoded in our cities, our rivers, our classrooms, and our morning commutes. We are paying the instalments on a loan taken out before most of us were born.

So what does a serious response look like? Three things, none of them new, all of them neglected.

The first is to properly fund what Bangladesh has already proven works. In 1994, the Female Secondary School Assistance Programme began offering stipends to girls who stayed in school and remained unmarried. Girls who received the stipend gained an average of 2.5 additional years of schooling, married later, and had measurably lower fertility rates. The development benefits outweighed costs by more than double, according to the Asian Development Bank. This was not imported wisdom. It was born here. It deserves to be treated as the most cost-effective population policy this country has ever run, not a welfare footnote in a five-year plan.

The second is decentralisation, undertaken with honesty about how long it takes. Dhaka is overcrowded because it is where everything is. Hospitals, universities, courts, and opportunities of any meaningful kind all concentrate here, and so people follow. South Korea pursued balanced regional development for decades, relocating government agencies, investing in secondary cities, and still, Seoul and its surrounding province hold roughly 45% of the national GDP. The lesson is not that the effort is futile. It is that the time to begin is now, and no single government will see it through alone. Bangladesh has Chittagong, Sylhet, Rajshahi, and Khulna. They are not underdeveloped by nature. They are underdeveloped by neglect and by the political will of whoever happens to be in office.

The third is to stop treating climate adaptation and population policy as separate conversations. The World Bank projects that 13.3 million Bangladeshis could be displaced by climate change by 2050, most of them heading, inevitably, toward Dhaka. Bangladesh has already shown that investment prevents this. After the 1970 Bhola cyclone killed 300,000 people, a sustained programme of embankments, shelters, and early warning systems reduced cyclone deaths by over a hundredfold. Every person who stays in their village is one fewer person in a city that cannot breathe. Every taka spent keeping people in their villages is a taka that prevents ten more from joining Dhaka's queue. These are not different ministries' problems. They are the same problem.

It is sometimes argued that concern about population is an elitist preoccupation, a rich world prescription for poor world people. The opposite is true. It is the rural woman, the slum dweller, the coastal farmer watching his land subdivide into nothing, who pays most acutely when too many people chase too few resources.

Addressing this is not something done to the poor. It is the one thing most consistently done for them, and most consistently avoided by the governments that claim to represent them.

Bangladesh graduates from Least Developed Country status this year, an achievement worth celebrating. 28% of our population is young, restless, and waiting. The question is not whether we have enough people. We have, by any reasonable measure, more than enough. The question is whether, when this window closes, we will have built something capable of supporting them.

The bus is full. The hospital is full. The classroom is full. But a full country and a finished country are not the same thing. There is still room, if not on the roads, then at least in the policy documents, for some urgent and overdue thinking.

Imon Chowdhury is a violinist by passion, who occasionally sets down his bow to pluck at his brain strings instead. On good days, both produce something worth listening to.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.