Ashish Bose believes the laws of economics will conquer racism.
The prominent demographer and professor’s theory rests on supply and demand: Developed countries need migrants in large numbers as their youth populations shrink.
“Germany may not like Turkish labour and Japan may not want any foreigners, but soon these two and other nations such as Norway, Sweden and France will have to become tolerant of migrant workers as they will have too many old people,” Bose says.
India, he maintains, has the most to gain with more than half of its population under age 25.
For the record, Bose is a young 76. He climbs 15 rungs of a steep staircase to an open terrace, unsupported, deftly carrying a tray of beer glasses in one hand.
Ashish Bose has studied various economic and sociological phenomena for five decades, reducing massive populations into decimal points, then classifying and comparing them and presenting his findings to the government. He segregates data on people into tables, all part of his effort to better understand man and woman, urban and rural, dwellers of hills and seas.
However, when he talks of poverty, Bose does not rattle off numbers. Instead, he turns empathetic, offering anecdotes from his long field trips into India’s most remote corners.
“The primary health centre (PHC) in India is the greatest symbol of how little things have changed for the poor in India,” he says. “Even today, after 60 years, the condition of PHCs is the same. No doctors, nurses, medical equipment and people walking for miles to get substandard treatment. It is the greatest failure of the Indian state.”
Bluntness defines Bose. (“I am not impressed by China as there is no freedom in that country,” he says.)
It was in the early 1980s that Bose made headlines by calling a spade a spade. Indian academicians tend to be politically correct and avoid terms that could insult a community or large groups of people.
But in a one-page synopsis submitted to the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, Bose blamed the “Bimaru” states for India’s burgeoning population. The now well-known acronym stands for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. However, the term had an uncanny resemblance to the Hindi word bimar, which means sick—and implied that these states also were.
Back then, Bose was employed by the population research centre at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. The professor’s stark description of these states demonstrated his concern for the demographic explosion in the cow belt and his need to ensure that Gandhi, who requested the report, digested his account quickly.
The paper argued that if India wanted to control its population, the government would need to focus on the states in the North as these four states accounted for more than 40% of India’s population.