Recently, Goa’s transport minister (and leader of the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party) Sudin Dhavalikar finally acknowledged the state’s most explosive and inconvenient truth, which an entire generation of politicians and administrators had consistently avoided confronting. Amidst statements urging the government support to all English-language primary schools, he said, “The indigenous Goan population figure of 6.50 lakh has remained static, and is less compared to the population speaking in different mother tongues. Hence, to force the local languages Konkani and Marathi on them is out of question. It is better to say we are Indian than Goan, but at the same time, we will have to work out a strategy to preserve the local languages.”Dhavalikar should be commended for being the first leader to concede this painful demographic reality, even if he did so inadvertently. It is crucially important to recognize that natives of Goa are a minority in their own homeland. All indications are they are now at best roughly one-third of the state population. This is the direct result of a scandalous dereliction of duty by successive administrations to check, control or manage the inflow of migrants, while also comprehensively failing to protect sustainable patterns of land use. Just over 50 years since Indian troops swiftly decapitated and ended the centuries-old Estado da India, an extensive historic demographic shift has dramatically remade the state citizenry, with massive spillover effects on culture, society and the environment.Besides local failure to anticipate or understand what has been happening in recent decades, there are parallel powerful trends playing out with similarly devastating effects in other parts of the country. Like Goa, many other parts of India are in population decline, with fertility rates now below replacement level of 2.1 children born to each woman. All the southern states (Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) have lowered birth numbers comparable to the most developed countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe. But that’s not the case with the mass of India’s population in the “cow belt”, where many hundreds of millions of people in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar are reproducing at a rate of well above 3 children per woman.Recently, the US-based Population Research Bureau (PRB) released its most recent Population Data Sheet, which indicates India will add an astonishing 323 million people in the next 33 years, by far the largest increase projected for any country (and almost exactly equal to the entire population in 1947). By 2050, India will be the most populous country in the world, with 1.7 billion citizens, a whopping 26% increase from today. Meanwhile, the second most populous country in 2050 will be China, at just 1.3 billion citizens, which represents a 4% decline, and the largest numerical reduction of any country at 44 million citizens.As within India, different peoples around the world face widely divergent demographic scenarios. The PRB data sheet predicts at least 39 countries will have fewer people in 2050. Japan’s population will decline by almost 25 million, Ukraine by 9 million, and Thailand by 3.5 million. The overall population of Europe will be less than today, while that of Africa will more than double by 2050. All this has huge economic and environmental ramifications, and will completely recast the global healthcare, education and employment landscapes. Three decades from now, well over one-third of the young people in the world will be in Africa, while most developed countries (and huge swathes of India) will have to deal with top-heavy ageing populations that need others to do most of the work.Those problems already play out in Goa, which has the lowest proportion of children (under 9 years old) of any state in the country, as well as the second-highest proportion of senior citizens (over 60 years old). Traditionally, these “young dependants” and “old dependants” were supported by a sustaining social fabric that relied on “productive age” members of their families. But steeply declining population numbers, combined with the effects of sustained emigration, as well as fraying collective impulses, means that more elderly and children are living in straightened circumstances. This is an invisible but steadily burgeoning crisis, which is exposing a fundamental ill-preparedness in both state and civil society institutions to deal with it.Every community, state and country in the world benefits from demographic balance, and correspondingly struggles when population numbers are thrown off-kilter. There is no doubt that Goa’s economy and society requires sufficient numbers of young people, whether natives or not. But there are ways to manage demographic shifts — even radical transitions from majority to permanent minority — without committing cultural suicide, and losing identity. It is a difficult challenge, but not insurmountable. The first step is to admit the problem, which Sudin Dhavalikar has finally done. But now his generation of political elites need to find some solutions, or history will judge them very harshly.(The writer is a photographer and widely published columnist. Views expressed are personal)