THE news that we will have a population of 150 million by year-end was the trigger that raised all those Malthusian fears and led to serious questions. What multiple strains would a population that big deliver to a land-short country the size of New Mexico but lacks the coping mechanisms and adequate resources to deal with them? And with problems as big, intractable and deeply rooted as the abject woes of impoverished Third World countries we are so familiar with? The reason I used New Mexico, a US state just about the size of our land area, as a point of comparison is for the shock value. New Mexico had a population of just 2.116 million in 2021, which barely moved in 2023. Let this sink in: New Mexico's 2.1167 million people versus our 150 million.

Those deeply worried about our runaway population growth — and I belong to that group — are starting to imagine the imperative rise in the next few years of gloomy, multilevel tenements existing side by side with the stilt houses of the sea gypsies in the coastal areas of Muslim Mindanao. But that is a real possibility: the rise of gloomy tenements in what used to be sparsely populated areas across the country simply because we have run out of areas to house the new generation and generations after that. If — there is always an 'if' — we have money for state-supported mass housing.