Is India a global superpower?

Overpopulation prevents India from being a global superpower

Question: Is India a global superpower?
Position‹2 of 3›: No, India has too many domestic issues to be a global superpower
Argument‹2 of 6›: Overpopulation prevents India from being a global superpower

India has the second-highest number of people in the world and accounts for approximately a sixth of the global population.

The argument

The argument treats population size as the constraint from which India's other domestic problems follow. It is estimated that by 2027, India will surpass China's population, earning it the title of the most populous country in the world — a trajectory attributed here to a lack of sexual education and laws that barely regulate the number of children a couple can have. The consequence drawn is about capacity rather than about population in itself. Overpopulation has contributed to other problems India has because it is difficult to provide for 1.3 billion people. That difficulty is arithmetical before it is political: all programs targeted at improving the quality of life have to have a giant budget to accommodate the millions of people that need help, because the cost of any per-person measure is multiplied by the number of people it must reach. A policy that would be affordable in a smaller country becomes unaffordable at that scale, and one that remains affordable reaches a smaller share of those who need it. That is what ties population to the particular failures the position names. Since India cannot control its population issue, they cannot completely contain other domestic issues such as poverty and sanitation — not because those problems are misunderstood or the will to address them is lacking, but because each year adds more people to the total that existing provision must be spread across, so progress in absolute terms need not register as progress in what any citizen experiences. The bearing on superpower status is the final inference. A state occupied with providing basic services to a population it cannot yet fully provide for has its resources and its attention committed at home, and that is the same capacity a global power would need to project abroad. On this argument overpopulation prevents India from being a global superpower.

Premises

[P1]India's population is projected to exceed 1.3 billion and become the world's largest, driven by inadequate sexual education and lax family-size regulation. [P2] Such a vast population makes it prohibitively expensive for any domestic program to meaningfully address poverty, sanitation, and quality of life. [P3] A country that cannot contain its own domestic crises lacks the stability and capacity required of a global superpower. [C] Therefore, India's overpopulation prevents it from being a global superpower.

Counter-arguments

With the development of technology, education, and women's rights, overpopulation will soon begin to fix itself. More women are receiving higher education and have more opportunities outside of motherhood. With education advancing throughout the country, citizens will be less inclined to have many children.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The causal account is out of date. India's fertility rate has fallen for decades and now sits at or below replacement level; continued growth reflects the age structure of a young population rather than unusually large families or an absence of family planning. [Rejecting P2] Size is not the same as burden. A large population is also a labour force, a tax base and an internal market, and the problems named — poverty and sanitation — turn on income, infrastructure and state capacity rather than on headcount as such. [Rejecting P3] Domestic problems do not preclude great-power standing. Every state ordinarily described as a superpower has carried serious internal poverty and inequality, so the premise sets a test that no candidate has ever met.