Up to five people can fit into a Nano - although there's no air conditioning, radio, power steering or electric windows. But it gets about 54 miles to the gallon.

As countries like India and China continue to post strong economic growth, individuals begin to prosper and the demand for cars begins to take shape.

Some have denounced the Nano as a source of further CO2 emissions in an over-polluted country. Why not invest in more public transport, instead of putting hundreds of thousands of cheap little cars on the roads of India?

But why should they not be entitled to the same conveniences that we take for granted?

There are about 18.5 million vehicles registered in Canada for a population of 32 million. The US has .8 vehicles per person.

We use around 53 billion litres of gas or diesel fuel. The governments we have elected have made limited progress with the formulation of a comprehensive environmental policy. Telling voters that they have to tighten their belts is never considered a popular tactic at the polls.

There's no question that people in India and China are as entitled to the consumer comforts that we've enjoyed for so long. The question is whether they'll learn from our mistakes - or merely be the victims of them.  rw

The possibility of India becoming the only country ever to have 2 billion people depends on the course of events in each of India 35 states and Union territories.

India passed the 1 billion population benchmark in 2000, and stood at 1.1 billion in 2007. The government has been concerned about population growth outpacing economic growth, and India was the first country to adopt a policy to slow population growth. Since the policy was first stated in 1952, the country's total fertility rate has declined from about six children per woman to about three, but fertility levels vary greatly throughout India.

The decline has been greater in its southern states, which have much higher rates of literacy and education. The southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu now have TFRs below two children per woman.

The large states of the north, the "Hindi Belt," are where about 40% of Indians live. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with about 93 million and 188 million people, currently have a TFR of about 4.3 children per woman.

The state and Union territory populations were projected under two scenarios. One assumed that states with a current TFR above "two children" would decrease to 2.1 and then remain constant. The other assumed the TFR decline would continue until it reached 1.85 children per woman.

The first scenario results in a population that would reach two billion in 2066-2071. By 2101, four states, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh would account for almost half of the country's population. Scenario B does not reach two billion, growth peaks in 2081-2086, after which it decreases.

This state-based projection series uses national fertility rates and age structures, and PRB (Population Reference Bureau) believes it provides a more realistic scenario. The population projected for Uttar Pradesh ranges from 353 million to 364 million by 2051, and between 414 million and 480 million by 2101. The projected 2101 total for India ranges from 1.9 billion to 2.2 billion, depending on the assumptions for each state.  rw

Gynaecologists advocated the need to adopt advanced strategies practiced in some of the countries in Africa.

Lack of access of health care facilities are responsible for maternal deaths. Facilities in remote areas of countries like India have no specialist doctors and advanced treatment facilities.

Non-specialist doctors do major surgeries and fail to diagnose complications. Children's health is directly related to mother's health. We should introduce advanced facilities in our villages.  rw

The coalition politics in India has also led to caste politics. While a small section of society has become richer, a large section remains poor.

Despite hurdles, the Indian manufacturing sector recorded a growth of 10% per annum with satisfactory growth in trade and services sectors. India has to develop micro-insurance to help its farmers. Water would be one of the main problems India would face in the future. India is one of the most modern and ancient nations on earth.

Its economy is growing at a rate of over eight per cent a year, propelling its massive population with economic might and geopolitical clout.

India's democracy is a source of comparative economic advantage and a unifying ideal, but corruption is rife in Indian politics and public administration.

Corruption is a key reason why India's infrastructure is in such a poor state.  rw   Karen Gaia says: No mention of overpopulation.

Other problems are, 70% of the population is lacking access to toilets, 170 million have no clean drinking water and a primary school dropout rate of 38%. Health problems are exacerbated by a gender bias. A girl in India is 50% more likely to die before her fifth birthday than her brother. A plan called for school dropout rates to fall 20% and maternal mortality by 75%, to 1 death per 1,000 births by 2012.

Sri Lanka is an example of a developing country that has achieved universal free schooling, drastically reduced infant mortality rates and boosted life expectancy. Bangladesh was also praised for achieving equality in school enrollment between boys and girls.  rw

expanding industrial and information sectors.

Few countries are as complex as India, that remains an essentially rural country steeped in centuries-old social and religious traditions. In its cities, large proportions of the population live in slums. Progress

has been remarkable, if uneven, particularly in light of its vast population. Agricultural production quadrupled in the 1960s and 1970s which, with expanded transportation and communications, have made famines nearly obsolete. But almost 50% of Indian children are malnourished although the health care system has raised life expectancy at birth to 63 from less than 40 in 1950. But less than half of births are attended by skilled health personnel, and maternal mortality is still high.

India's population growth awoke as progress was made against disease and hunger to 1 billion in 2000. Slowing this growth became a national priority, and India can count many successes. But India's social diversity has resulted in very different demographic situations. High fertility in the Hindi Belt compared with below-replacement fertility in Kerala. India's future population size will depend upon what happens in the heavily populated north. Will India become the world's first population of 2 billion? It is well within possibility and is one of India's most compelling future issues.

To stress the size of India's population, just one group, Indian boys

below age 5, numbers 62 million - more than the total population of France.  rw

Fertility continued to decline as a result of increased use of contraception and increase in the age of marriage.

Institutional births have been increasing in all states except Chhattisgarh, where there has been only a slight increase in the last seven years. The five states showed the proportion of married women report that they had been abused by their husbands and women with no education are most likely to have suffered spousal violence.

Between 1998 and 2006, the percentage of married women who have heard of AIDS increased from 20 to 41% in Chhattisgarh, from 30% to 49% in Gujarat, from 39% to 62% in Orissa, from 55% to 70% in Punjab and from 61% to 79% in Maharashtra.

Men are more likely to have heard of AIDS. Two-thirds of men in Chhattisgarh and more than 90% in Maharashtrta and Punjab have heard of AIDS. For the first time NFHS-3 will be providing community based HIV prevalence estimates for all India and Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.  rw

Actually, the number of such towns is just 22 if one aggregates figures for adjoining townships such as Kolkata and Howrah, Delhi and Faridabad, Pune and Pimpri/Chinchwad and Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan.

Though in the absence of additional data, such as, income tax collections in various towns or motor vehicle registrations, it is hard to say what portion of total urban spend these 22 settlements account for, we may not be too far wrong in guessing that average household consumer expenditure in these 22 towns is, say, 2.5 times the Rs 56,000 figure reported by NSS for all urban households in 2003.

Apart from allowing us to cut down the number of million plus cities from 27 to 22, a look at Census 2001 data in its totality also allows us to identify another 21 towns with population size ranging from 7,00,000 to just under 1 million (there were four such towns in 2001, Allahabad, Amritsar, Vishakapatnam and Rajkot, all of which have probably crossed the 1 million mark by now).

Taken together these 43 towns, less than one per cent of the total, account for 32 per cent of India's total urban population. The 21 `million-minus' towns added to the earlier 22, too, probably spend rather more per household per year than do the remaining 5,118 census towns.

In mapping out marketing strategy to reach consumers in urban areas, for boosting sales of FMCGs, durables, banking, insurance and mutual funds, the best thing to do would probably be to focus on these 43 towns, plus the 25-30 key towns such as Mangalore and Kochi that have a population of around half a million each, and treat the remaining Census towns as being simply feeders for rural markets.