Overpopulation

Why is Overpopulation a Major Issue?

 ( By Suhana Ahmed ) 

Image By:- Goutham Sagar

The world is a place for innumerable numbers of species, and homo-sapiens are one of the most powerful ones, given the current circumstances. 

The first humans appeared on earth around four million years ago, and today are monopolizing the world. The human population has grown exponentially through time and today. Just around two hundred years ago, the world's population was just above one million and today it is close to eight billion people. 

Amongst the continents, Asia is the most populated one, comprising around sixty-one percentage of the population. China, the most populated country has around 1.4 billion people and India is a close second with 1.38 billion. Thirty-seven percent of the world population lives just in these two nations. 

Now, having a strong population can be a good thing. With human power and resources, there can be a lot of progress brought in, especially economically. But, there is also a point to be noted that even that has to have a limit. If the population of masses exceeds a limit, that no longer is beneficial. 

Overpopulation is one of the major causes of many of the social evils, such as poverty, illiteracy, low economy, malpractices etcetera. It leads to large scale chaos and long term problems. 

Causes of overpopulation:

When science and technology started developing, and industrialization happened, vaccines to many incurable diseases until then were found, and as well as antibiotics were prepared to induce the immune system so as to not get affected by many microorganisms. This way the mortality rate reduced but the birth rate remained constant, also since the medical field was growing exponentially, stillbirths were reduced to a greater level. 

Now, despite the fall of mortality rate and the invention of vaccines is a piece of good news and was a necessary move, people weren't ready for what was about to come. The birth rates didn't decrease. There wasn't family planning or scientific awareness about pregnancy and its contraptions. This paved the way for the population to grow immensely. 

Another major reason being immigration. The population isn't evenly divided among every boundary. There is an imbalance. It's a known fact that India has been a place of millions of migrants. Not only this but after industrialization, people from villages started migrating to cities in search of jobs and building better lives. This brought an imbalance in the population per area and those areas that were immigrated to started becoming compact, leading to the resources being shabbily distributed and lack of amenities. 

These are a few causes of overpopulation.

Negative Effects of overpopulation:

1. Exhaustion of natural resources: When the population of a particular place increases, the resources available there are used more and more. This leads to scarcity of those natural resources, because no matter if it's an inexhaustible resource, nature has a limitation, and it is said that currently, the rate of consumption of nature's raw materials is more than the rate of creation. 

2. More pollution: The more the population in the country, the more transportation is used, which usually runs on fossil fuels. Burning of fossil fuels is not only pollutant and hazardous, but also fossil fuels are exhaustible resources and their availability is way lesser than that of inexhaustible resources. 

Besides, when there is more number of people just put in one place to live their lives, water bodies are corrupted too. It causes water scarcity and puts the aquatic life in danger. 

This also leads to global warming and climate change. 

3. Unemployment: In developing countries like India especially, there aren't as many jobs as there are people. Not everybody gets a job to keep themselves and their family alive and at many times, they resort to begging. Even the ones who get the jobs, do not get the ones actually fit for them, and live their lives as underemployed.

4. Increase in crime rates: Since overpopulation leads to unemployment, the masses who have a huge struggle getting a job many times resort to criminal ways, like robbery, drug dealing, and murder. As the population increases, the fight for the resources increases too, and to keep themselves stable, they rely on wrongdoings, which hampers the nation, the people, their families, and themselves.

5. Child Labor: It is no hidden fact that poverty stems from child labor, and as the population exceeds the limit, the number of children working abandoning their studies increases. Children have to let go of their dreams and ambitions to support their families. 

6. Pandemics and Epidemics: Considering the current situation of coronavirus, taking an example of India itself, we can see how much it is affecting the entire nation. 

There is a high rate of poverty and innumerable numbers of people without a permanent shelter. They're now homeless and have a higher chance of getting infected. Since the population is more and areas are compact, if one contracts the infection, everyone existing close to them is mostly sure to get infected too.

There aren't enough medical kits or beds with our healthcare department and the economy falling isn't helping that situation either. This also has a part to play in increasing death rates. 

The above mentioned are just a few impacts of overpopulation and there are plenty more and all these problems can be solved only if started with creating awareness. Education for everyone is an important thing. People need to be given sex education and taught the importance of family planning and contraception. Manufacturing of native products will increase employment and decrease crime rates. 

Everyone needs to come together and work together to solve this issue. People need to be careful and judiciously use natural resources also keeping in mind the future generations.

This is our earth and it is our responsibility to protect it. 

 

Disclaimer:-

The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Light de Literacy and LDL does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.