z:\ ambedkar\vol-02\vol2-04.indd MK SJ+YS 21-9-2013/YS-8-11-2013 272
272 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
financially and it is really these people that stand in need of help. Considered from the point of the necessary capital alone, this remedy cannot afford relief to many persons.
Besides this, it must be kept in mind that sparsely populated countries are unwilling to accommodate others because they require elbow-room for their own increasing progeny. Canada is a colony in the British Empire mainly inhabited by Englishmen but it is notorious that the Canadians refused to allow English labourers, who had gone there for seasonal work, to settle in their land. Wars are occasioned by the attempts of populous countries to force their entrance in sparse regions. An illustration on the point, which is quite recent and near to us, is afforded by Burma. The cause underlying the recent communal riots there was mainly the suspicion in the minds of the Burmans that Indian marred their material progress. Compared to over-populated countries, regions of sparse populations are very few, Japan, Italy, Germany, China, India and many other countries are over-populated. It is not possible to find adequate room for emigrants from all these lands.
One more point in this connection is also worth mentioning. Emigration cannot solve the population problem of a country permanently. Like air, expanding population has a tendency to fill up vacuum immediately, leading to the recurrence of the former condition and hence it is obvious that there is no go without birth-control.
Some think that as soon as child-marriages are given up and late marriages are introduced, the increase in population will be checked. But this belief also is an unfounded one. In the first place, years must elapse before the ages at which girls are married would be sufficiently raised in our country. The years of greatest fertility in the case of girls are those between 18 and 22. In Western countries, women marry after this period. That is, they marry when their time of greatest fertility is over. When we notice the difficulties in the enforcement of the Sarda Act, fixing the minimum age of marriage of a girl at 14, we can easily see that it is almost useless to hope that in the near future women in our country will postpone their marriages up to
22 and population will be checked thereby. Mr. P. K. Wattal has drawn the following conclusions from the fertility-enquiry conducted specially in connection with the 1931 census.
(1) That girls married at ages below twenty give birth to a smaller number of children than girls married at ages above twenty.
(2) That the survival-rate of children born to mothers married at ages below twenty is much less than that of children born to mothers married at ages above twenty.
These conclusions show us that even when late marriages would come into vague generally, there is no chance of population being appreciably checked thereby. More children would live upto mature ages and hence there is a chance of an increase and not a decrease in the rate of growth of our population.