According to Shekhar, Thomas Malthus’ theory that ‘population growth would easily outrun the extra food available, leading to famine, mass deaths and a return to the original situation’ is erroneous. Today, Malthusian arguments usually bemoan the fact that as numbers grow ‘we will run out of something or the other—trees, coal or oil—and at that point we will face catastrophies of shortage and misery.’ But, this, says Shekhar, overlooks the ‘perennial inventiveness of humans’ and the fact that as a resource grows scarce, ‘its price rises quickly, leading to redoubled and invariably successful attempts to develop an alternative resource.’

Fair enough. But what is the alternative to land? As numbers grow, yes, we can improve food productivity, land use as well as distribution. But we cannot grow more land although that inestimable provider of joy and bounty, carrier of hope and tragedy, the Brahmaputra, and its numerous allies bring down silt and help ‘grow land’ in Assam and Bangladesh. Even these great friends have their limitations.

Yes, we need to develop non-land, non-agriculture-based economies, especially those relating to information technology. But if you have a shortage of land, an extremely impoverished rural population and money concentrated in the hands of a rich elite, then you have problems which ‘enhancing the quality of human capital’ alone will not help to solve. Land prices do rise quickly and this resource goes to those who can afford to buy it, or capture it by force.

Land is the resource over which different communities fight for it represents both a source of identity-formation and the last hope of economic security, if not survival. Where then are the alternatives in real time, in real places, for real people? Job creation in non-land-based activities is one, and this is an area of investment for domestic and international industry. This is unlikely to happen in large parts of South Asia for several more decades because of the reasons we have discussed throughout this book: the lack of infrastructure, the lack of growing incomes, local and regional disparities, the lack of adequate nutrition and the continuing gender bias.

What is the option? You pack up and go next door to where land appears to be a more equitable resource—or so it seems to you—and not under the kind of pressure that is faced at home. You inflict or carry the problems that you faced in your original home on a new community or set of communities, on new land.

A chapter in a recent World Watch book begins with these words: ‘While economists tout record-breaking increases in global commerce in recent decades, more sobering statistics are being put forth by the world’s leading biologists: the loss of living species in recent decades, they report, represents the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.’7

So, how far was Malthus off the mark? Not very, I would say.

Immigration Revisited