Population Boom and Challenges of Sustainable Development in India

India is holding 2.4% of the global land area with 16% of the world’s population. The population in India has increased from 238 million to more than one billion in the present century and now erupts to 140 crores, surpassing China in the present period. This sudden increase in population is large enough to engulf and to neutralize all our efforts to conserve the resource endowment and protect the environment. This abrupt increase in population has caused fragmentation in land holdings, and created a rural-urban divide, causing socio-economic problems in cities including housing, mushrooming of slums, burden on municipal facilities along with poor human development indices like education, gender disparities, malnutrition, growing lack of opportunities in backward regions. The rising population has serious implications for food and water, food security, health care, rural-urban services and the sustainability of ecosystems.