WHEN THE DYKES ARE THREATENED
 

"For the first time we are reiterating the fact that population is one of the four major problems of India, though I rate it as absolutely the number one ... When the dykes are threatened, the response to the swelling tide has to be instant and sizeable enough, to contain the threat."

J. R. D. Tata

J. R. D. Tata, the doyen of Indian industry and illustrious scion of the far-famed Tata Group of Companies, on receiving the UN Population Award for 1992 at the United Nations, said: "If the growth of the population of India continues at the present rate it will, in the remaining eight years left of this century, reach one billion, rising to about 1.7 billion a mere 25 years later at a rate of annual increase which is already among the highest in the world including China." Truly. India reached the one billion mark on May 12, 2000.

India's status has suffered in the international sphere. Countries with huge populations and attendant poverty carry a sort of stigma as the Yellow Peril in the past, involving social and economic discrimination. In contrast, countries in Europe have been quite successful in controlling their population. Their success has stemmed mainly from the existence thereof of two fundamental socio-economic elements. First, the firm determination among the child-bearing members of their generation that their children be not only strong and healthy, but also well educated or, at least well trained in the specialised skills required for a productive career. The second element was their awareness that today the cost of modern professional education had become in most countries so high as to make it impossible for parents to afford large families. It is the awareness and acceptance of these two beliefs, with the accompanying constraints, that have transformed the social habits of the people of those countries and motivated them to control the size of their families. In dramatic contrast, the very absence of these two elements in India, especially in UP, MP, Bihar and Rajasthan, home to 40 per cent of the country’s population, has been the main reason for its failure to control the rate of growth of its population and the main reason therefore for its continuing poverty.

The Tata Group of Companies are fully mindful of their social responsibilities. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, founder of the Tata Group of Companies, ranks among the greatest visionaries of industrial enterprise of all time. A facet of his remarkable breadth of conception was his recognition that corporate social responsibility was fundamental to India’s drive for industrialisation, one of his defining tenets being "the wealth which comes from the people must as far as possible go back to the people."

A pioneer in town planning, he was mainly responsible for modernising Bombay; he envisaged and conceived a steel town to the very last detail, later to be named Jamshedpur, after him.

The founder had exhorted his sons to pursue and develop his life’s work. His elder son, Dorab Tata, carried out the bequest with scrupulous zeal and distinction. Thus, even though it was Jamsetji Tata who had envisioned the mammoth projects, it was in fact Dorab Tata who actually brought the ventures to existence and fruition. He was the first Chairman of the gigantic Tata enterprises.

It was Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhai (J.R.D.) Tata, son of Ratanji Tata, who personally crusaded for issues that he felt were imperative for India’s development -- Family Planning, women’s education, spread of literacy. J.R.D. Tata rose to the position of Chairman of Tata Sons Ltd. just 13 years after being in the position of an apprentice in 1925 without a salary. Today, Tata Steel in Jamshedpur has won world renown as being Asia’s first and the largest integrated private sector steel plant in the country.

Tatas took their lead in Family Planning way back in the mid-fifties and made it a part of the management policy in 1967. All big companies within the Tata group set up their own Family Planning services such as motivation, supply of contraceptives and sterilization. The smaller companies within the group started making use of services of voluntary agencies like the Family Planning Association of India, Municipal Corporation and Government. Apart from the use of publicity media, social workers visited workers’ homes regularly, as well as out-patients and neighbouring villages.