In the 1960s and the 1970s amid decolonisation and the Cold war Battle for hearts and minds in newly independent countries, world elites became obsessed with a new danger called overpopulation. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich pronounced in his 1968 best seller “The Population Bomb.” The world simply had too many people already and famines killing hundreds of millions of people would break out in the 70s.
He specifically forecasted the New York times Clyde Haberman recalls that 65 million Americans would starve and that by 2020 England will not exist. However, England still exists and 65 million Americans did not starve. But while Ehrlich predictions proved wrong, his beliefs were shared by officials of major institutions like the World Bank and foundations like Rockefeller and Ford.
And those foundations were increasingly successful spreading a gospel of the population control abroad particularly in newly independent India. On this episode of Future Podcast, we look at Douglas Ensminger, an official at the Ford Foundation who created infrastructure for large scale sterilisation programmes in India, where millions of men in rural and urban areas alike could receive vasectomies in the hope of population threat.
Historian Gyan Prakash and sociologist Savina Balasubramaniam walk us through the horrifying end result of Ensminger’s efforts. In 1975, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the declaration of national emergency. She seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay Gandhi went on a mass sterilisation program that registers as one of the vastest disturbing human rights violations in the country’s modern history.
Ensminger and Ford were intervening in a foreign democracy under the banner of philanthropy and gave that foreign democracy tools that Gandhi used for vast wrongdoing when she decided to suspend democracy and leap into autocratic terror. And at that time that result was the cause of celebration and not dismay. The World Bank President Robert McNamara praised Gandhi declaring “At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem.
Thankfully, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations have distanced themselves from these practices in recent decades. We talked to a Columbia historian Matthew Connelly about how and what happened and what foundations can learn from the disastrous history of population control to address other global challenges like climate change, pandemic disease and nuclear war. We know what a disastrous effort to tackle a global problem looks like. What, then does a successful report look like?
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