Drawing on broader political and philosophical warnings on overpopulation from Winston Churchill, the Orissa High Court on Friday dismissed a plea of a former gram panchayat member who had been disqualified from his village’s council, exceeding the statutory limit of two children.
A division bench of Justices Krishna Shripad Dixit and Chittaranjan Dash heard the matter at the Orissa High Court. In his plea, a gram panchayat member sought to overturn the disqualification order of a single judge.
The petitioner challenged his termination from membership of the gram panchayat under Section 25(1)(v) (disqualifies a person from being a member e.g., sarpanch, ward member, if they have more than two children) of the Odisha Gram Panchayat Act, 1964. The court dismissed the plea and hinted at India’s larger population problem in its final order.
What did the Orissa HC say?
In its order, the court invoked the public memory of the Covid-19 pandemic to talk about the pressure that’s put on the state’s infrastructure because of India’s ‘overpopulation’ problem. “Memory has not faded about the difficulties which people of the country faced during the COVID-19 pandemic because of space constraints when they were asked to maintain a safe distance.”
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Justice Dixit, who authored the verdict, quoted former British PM Winston Churchill’s lines as saying, “India is not a nation, but a mere population.”
The bench added that Churchill made this claim long before the partition, when the then population of undivided India was about 30 crores or so. “What comment Churchill would have made, had he been alive today, will drive one to wild imagination,” they added.
Emphasising the danger of a growing population, the judge further quoted British philosopher Bertrand Russell as saying, “Population explosion is more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb.”
Invoking economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the court warned that population, when left unchecked, increases at a “geometrical ratio,” doubling every 25 years and outstripping resources.
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What does the data say?
The Court’s intervention comes at a time when the Economic Survey 2025-26 explicitly identifies India as a nation of 145 crore people.
While the Survey highlights India’s “strong macroeconomic performance” and “stellar economic fundamentals,” it also warns that the country’s size precludes the possibility of “templates worthy of emulation”.
The UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar had previously expressed concern on the topic of the impact of overpopulation on global health and environmental systems.
“If rapid population growth in the developing nations is left unchecked, it will evidently undermine all efforts for economic and social development and could easily lead to widespread depletion of each nation’s resources,” Javier Perez had said.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) India Policy, for the year 2023-2027, enlists four states, namely, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Odisha, as priority provinces for addressing population growth rate. It mentions that the population of Odisha is 3.32 per cent of the nation’s population, and it is a vibrant mix of traditions, languages, and communities. |
