In the past couple of weeks newspapers both near and far have been splashed with headlines about the world’s burgeoning population, which, according to United Nation’s demographers, have reached 7 billion on October 31—at least two, three years sooner than earlier predictions.

The human race has been multiplying at ever more alarming speed. If the first billion of people took us nearly two thousand years to reach, (1804 to be exact) then the most recent billion reportedly having only taken 12 years. The tremendous human impact on all aspects of bio-sphere amounts to the biggest crisis ever to face the planet. The added carbon emissions alone will have a devastating effect on climate change.

Worst, experts noted the majority of the births are now happening in developing countries least able to cope with the resource and environmental consequences. An UN report predicts that world population will hit 9.1 billion by 2050, with India and Pakistan seeing the biggest increases. Already India is home to 17.3 percent of the world’s population, even though it only has 2.4 percent of the world’s land area. (For the record, China has 22 percent of the world’s population and 6.3 percent of the world’s land area) Although India’s fertility rate has come down dramatically over the past decades, it still registers at 2.6 in 2011, well above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. By 2040 or sooner, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation with 1.52 billion people. Talk about overcrowding.

As China’s fertility rate has already slid to 1.54, demographers and green environmentalists’ attention is now focused on India: just what must the country do to address its overpopulation challenge?

Critics such as New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof (International Herald Tribune, Nov. 4, 2011) suggest family planning programs as a key solution, citing how they have helped push Indian women’s fertility from 6 in 1950 to the current rate of 2.6. But history shows that top-down birth control programs typically bring very mixed results, and sometimes with devastating consequences. One obvious example is China’s very controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979. Yes, China’s one-child policy has helped prevent at least 400 million births during the past 30 years, at least according to government figures. But the extreme policy has also resulted in a rapid ageing society with a dearth of young care-takers.

Another serious effect of China’s policy is the huge gender imbalance—a result of many female fetuses having been aborted, or girl babies being abandoned and subsequently taken out of the country as adopted children. Now many Chinese men face the daunting prospect of not being able to find wives.

Less well known is that India has also courted with extreme birth control measures in recent history. During India’s state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, an infamous family planning initiative was introduced by Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India. This included forcibly dragging poor men and women to the operating theaters in makeshift tents for sterilization, and police surrounding entire villages at night and herding the villagers into camps. In fact, one of my Indian friends admitted to me recently that her mother, a school teacher, was once involved in identifying women for such forcible surgeries, with the quota being two women a day. Her mother was told she couldn’t expect a promotion unless she fulfilled her quota. The program caused an outcry and a lasting backlash against any initiative associated with family planning.

Even today, India continues to use a combination of carrots and sticks to carry out sterilization drives, with women bearing the brunt of the burden. In the Indian state of Rajasthan, for example, health officials are offering cheap locally made cars, motor cycles, food blenders and televisions as a lure in an attempt to sign up 20,000 couples for sterilization.

Yet in a country with deep patriarchal roots, where gender inequality continues to compare poorly with the rest of the world, (India was placed 129th among 146 countries in terms of Gender Inequality Index, lagging behind neighboring Sri Lanka and even Pakistan, according to UNDP figures from 2011) it’s the women who end up being pushed by their husbands to the operating theaters in exchange for the lucrative prize. According to the most recent health ministry statistics, a larger than expected dip in recent years in men wanting to get involved in family planning means women sterilization remains the mainstay of India’s population program.

More disturbingly, as more Indian couples begin to embrace smaller size families, either by force or by choice, the gender ratio of the nation has become more skewed, with India now having unnaturally large numbers of boys, much like what China has been experiencing. A recent Economist article entitled “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls” explains how a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons, a modern desire for smaller families and the availability of ultrasound scanning technologies that identify the sex of a fetus, have combined to push for greater incidences of female infanticide since the 1980s both in India and China, as well as in other Asian and African countries:

“In societies where four or six children are common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India.” (http://www.economist.com/node/15636231) Largely as a result of this practice, there are an estimated 80 million missing girls alone in China and India.

Meanwhile, in rural parts of India and China, where contraceptive means are not always available, many families continue to have multiple babies in the hopes of procuring a son, which not only pushes birth rates up, but also leads to abandonment of many “unwanted” new-born girls or the neglect of daughters. Such practice is particularly prevalent in families where poverty has limited the number of desired children.

Rather than relying on enforced population control measures, which more often than not act selectively against women and tend to lead to atrocious abortions rates of females and infanticide, emphasis should be put on voluntary family planning and women’s education instead.

It is a well recognized fact that women’s education is one of the biggest factors in reducing fertility. Many scholars have pointed out that when a woman’s education level rises, she tends to marry late, have fewer babies, possess better knowledge about contraceptives and is better able to plan her family. The correlation between education and fertility rate is amply demonstrated in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which has the highest literacy rate of India, with 92 percent for women and 96 percent for men, as well as the nation’s lowest fertility rate at 16.7. The state also has one of the most favorable sex ratios in the country at 1084, compared with the national average of 940.

Providing quality and readily available health care to children and contraceptive information to women, especially those living in rural parts of India, is another key to solving the overpopulation problem. The World Fertility Survey of 1984 indicated that many mothers in developing countries did not want any more children, but were not able to have easy access to safe, effective and affordable contraceptive aids or reproductive health information. Once these services become available, women will voluntarily want to have fewer babies.

Likewise, birth rates will also fall heavily if young children, often seen as pension plans by the poor, have a lower mortality rate, which would make it unnecessary for parents to have multiple children in order to offset the problem that some of them may not survive into adulthood.

Strict laws against the century-old dowries system and abolition of child marriages, which continue to be very common in India, as well as more supportive laws for women to inherit properties are also needed if the strong son-preference of Indian parents is to be corrected. But again, none of these measures would be successful without India first focusing on raising Indian women’s education level.

According to the latest UNDP Report, only about 27 percent of Indian women aged over 25 have had a secondary education. India’s education index is lower than that of neighboring Bangladesh (30.8) and lags far behind any of the other BRICS nations.

As Ashish Bose, a veteran Indian demographer, is quoted as saying in a recent Business Standard article, rather than returning to enforcement of birth control and targeted sterilization, India’s “first priority should be compulsory literacy” and the second, “the enrolment and upgrading the quality of education and teachers.” Along with this there should be investment in health care “so that children don’t continue to die in droves, forcing people to have more children.” (http://www.business-standard.com/taketwo/news/are-we-too-many/455144/)

Yes, population measures aimed at education, empowerment of women and health care system will all take time. But the non-pervasive and constructive approach will pay off for India big time in the long run.