democracy is foreign loans, and India's reluctance to request
them matches the West's reluctance to grant them.

Even if the loans are forthcoming, it cannot be certain that
the plan will succeed in raising living standards significantly.
There are two drags on Indian progress that even in favorable
circumstances may yet prevent success. One is the political
problem of the quarrel with Pakistan, the other the biological
problem of "population explosion."

Pakistan by claiming the right to create an Islamic state
for those Indians who are Moslems, struck at the very root of
Nehru's secular-state ideals. . . .

Within the {recent} past, as Pakistan his begun to receive
American arms "to defend herself against Russia," India has felt
bound to match those deliveries by purchases, mainly from Britain,
paid for in cash. The cost is crippling and at present represents
the largest single item of foreign-exchange expenditure. As long
as the quarrel lasts, both countries will be sadly weakened by it,
and there is not much the outside world can do about it. . . .

It is harder to see how anything can be done to solve the
population problem in India, a problem that is duplicated in
China. But very briefly, the problem is that India's net birth rate
has become so high in the past forty years that all the quite
considerable increases in production are swallowed up by the
new mouths to be fed.

India is already grossly overpopulated, and though it is about
one third the size of the United States, it has more than twice
the population. The basic cause of Indian (indeed of Asian)
poverty is simply that each family has to live on what a single
acre of not very fertile ground will produce. Today the govern-
ment of India spends vast sums of money on propaganda for
birth control, but the results are negligible. Still, faith is pinned
on the ultimate discovery of a simple contraceptive that can be
produced cheaply and taken orally. This, the experts say, will
change everything. Non-experts may surely be permitted a wide
measure of skepticism.

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