I’m using a term borrowed from Marika Vicziany’s paper on family planning in India. In it, she explains Gunnar Myrdal’s definition of the “soft state” to be representative of either a democratic or authoritarian regime that lacked internal social discipline or the political desire to bring about basic reforms in the interests of the whole. She argues that India continued to be a soft state despite the imposition of emergency, and that family planning was a coercive process primarily instituted against peasants and the urban poor. See Marika Vicziany, “Coercion in a Soft State: The Family-Planning Program of India: Part I: The Myth of Voluntarism,” Pacific Affairs 55, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 373–402.
Indira Gandhi, Selected Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, Vol. III: September 1972–March 1977 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1984), quoted in Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 173.
The opening lines of the film paint a somber view of the Indian nation with an acute housing shortage. “One doesn’t need a second look at an Indian city or village to spot its slums,” it begins. “Shanty towns spring up from mud and asphalt alike, with what seems to be an unnatural abandon. Grimy mohallas and tumbled-down one-room tenements, and in them, families of men packed in like sardines, sharing squalor and apathy with each other. These things make for neither dignity nor convenience. Yet, people must live somewhere, one must have a roof over one’s head, even if it has to be shared with a crowd.” See Pratap Parmar, Housing for the People (New Delhi: Films Division, Ministry of Broadcast and Information, Government of India, 1970), Film.
Gandhi, Selected Speeches and Writings.
See U. Thant, “S-0885-0001-42-00001,” in Items in Conference on Human Survival, May 25, 1970 (United Nations Archives Container S-0885-0001: Operational Files of the Secretary General U. Thant: Speeches, Messages, Statements and Addresses). Paul Ehrlich, in his 1974 paper co-authored with John Holdren, wrote: “Three dangerous misconceptions appear to be widespread among decision-makers and others with responsibilities related to population growth, environmental deterioration, and resource depletion. The first is that the absolute size and rate of growth of the human population has little or no relationship to the rapidly escalating ecological problems facing mankind.” The second misconception he noted was that environmental deterioration consisted primarily of pollution, while the third was that natural resources were in an unlimited supply. Of course, in the context of the cold war, anxiety around resource conservation was ideologically encoded, and the distribution of energy linked to adjudicating the alliances between the US and the Soviet Union. See John P. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich, “Human Population and the Global Environment: Population Growth, Rising per Capita Material Consumption, and Disruptive Technologies Have Made Civilization a Global Ecological Force,” American Scientist 62, no. 3 (May–June 1974): 282–292.
As Matthew Connelly notes, no other country attempted to control its fertility over such a long period. India was the first country to adopt policies to reduce rather than improve fertility, and together with other South Asian countries, was the testing ground for new contraceptive techniques. See: Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Holdren and Ehrlich, “Human Population and the Global Environment,” 282.
George W.S. Trow, “India’s Haphazard Birth Control Program,” Ekistics 25, no. 149 (April 1968): 232–233.
For instance, Roy Greep, a professor of Population Studies at Harvard, wrote in his article to the issue: “the reason for the present unprecedented increase in population growth is the introduction of death control without birth control.” Noting that the population growth in advanced countries was modest in comparison to the “less-developed and heavily populated nations,” Greep outlined the foremost apprehensions of the time: resource scarcity, balance of political power, and the “rising tide of colour.” If his article mirrored a racialized, elitist anxiety where the poorest and weakest would outnumber the most capable, it also framed much of Euro-American environmentalist discourse at the time, which claimed that unchecked population growth (from the former colonies) threatened the welfare of mankind. “The one and only humane solution to the population problem,” Greep argued, “is birth control, whether practiced with contraceptive aids or by voluntary restraint.” See Roy O. Greep, “The Population Crisis is Here,” Ekistics 25, no.149 (April 1968): 208–210.
See Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1972).
“Population Control Dynamism of Universe” (Typescript of Buckminster Fuller’s talk to Carbondale Staff Meeting), November 1969, M1090_S8_B75_f8, Mixed Materials 75, Folder 8, Buckminster Fuller Papers, Stanford University.
For more on Buckminster Fuller and the World Game, see Mark Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016).
Indeed, in the early 1960s, Fuller and his collaborator, John McHale, had recognized that there were negative aspects to resource over-exploitation. Citing figures and estimates from scientific journals and magazines, UN reports, and US Congressional proceedings, they noted that, “so far, our modification of the earth has proceeded with little regard for the intricacy of the overall ecological balances which maintain life on earth. We have taken little heed, for example, in modifying the environment for our own use, of the disruption of the populations of animals, micro-organisms, plants, etc., with which the maintenance of our own ecological cycle is still closely interwoven.” See John McHale, “World Design Science Decade Phase 1 Document 4” (World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, 1965), 22.
The relationship between resources, sustenance, and the number of people—a theory supported by mathematical models where people reproduce at a geometrical rate, but the resources to support them could only grow arithmetically.
Buckminster Fuller, “World Design Science Decade Phase 1 Document 3” (World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, 1965), 109.
Ibid. Fuller writes: “Politicians are rarely scientific minded and being preoccupied with this and next year’s elections, do not think about and would not dare to initiate long years of comprehensive readjustment threatening to the special economic advantage of those who pay for their campaigns. Because of the scientific discovery of fundamental and total life support adequacy and feasibility politics are obsolete; they are omni-lethal to humanity’s survival. You are apolitic, that is why you are essential to humanity at this critical moment in all human times. You are a clear-headed planetary housekeeper for humanity. When the housekeeper knows that there is enough for all, she doesn’t need any politicians around the house.”
McHale, “World Design Science Decade,” 90.
Correspondence from Buckminster Fuller to Indira Gandhi, January 1970, M1090_S2_B195_f9, Mixed Materials 76, Folder 10, Buckminster Fuller Papers, Stanford University.
“Human Environment: Address to the Plenary Session of the United Nations Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm, June 14, 1972,” Indira Gandhi Speeches and Writings (New York: Harper Row, 1975), 193.
Ibid., 193.
Ibid., 195.
Design for Living was a joint proposal between India, Mexico, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Poland and Yugoslavia presented at the 14th General Conference of the UNESCO, that brought to the fore the importance of man’s natural habitat.
“A Design for Living: A project for UNESCO action sponsored by consensus at the Nehru Round Table, New Delhi, September, 1966,” in MARG 20, no. 3 (June 1967): 5.
“Human Environment: Address to the Plenary Session,” 199.
Ibid., 198.
Jawaharlal Nehru, “Opening Remarks at the International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing by the Prime Minister, 25th October 1953,” New Delhi.
“Government Aided Housing Schemes,” Report of the Development Group on Low Cost Housing (New Delhi: Ministry of Works and Housing, National Buildings Organisation and U.N. Regional Housing Centre ESCAP, September 1977), 10.
India: Family Planning Programme since 1965 (New Delhi: Ministry of Health, Family Planning and Urban Development, Department of Family Planning, 1968), 1.
Ibid., 7.
See Annual Report 1968-1969 (New Delhi: Ministry of Health, Family Planning, Works, Housing and Urban Development, 1969), 31; Report of the Development Group on Low Cost Housing, 1.
A Collection of Designs of Houses for Low Income Groups (New Delhi: Government of India National Buildings Organisation and UN Regional Housing Centre ECAFE, 1969), iii.
Report of the Development Group on Low Cost Housing, 8.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 9. “Analysing our goal with regards to housing, it should be aimed at initially providing a dwelling with a minimum accommodation of one living room, one multipurpose room with cooking space, a bath and WC, but with the objective of having later on a minimum house consisting of two living rooms, a kitchen, a bath and a WC.”
Ibid., 8.
Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 281.
Savina Balasubramanian, “Motivating Men: Social Science and the Regulation of Men’s Reproduction in Postwar India,” Gender and Society 32, no. 1 (February 2018): 34–58, 37.