The end of the American sibling

This article was first published in The ipaper on September 16, 2026.

Here are excerpts from Population Balance executive director, Nandita Bajaj

Some people have a very different perspective. Nandita Bajaj is executive director of Population Balance, a US-based nonprofit that urges the population to “shrink towards abundance”. She believes that the Earth is “on the brink of collapse” and that a lower population would be “good from a human rights perspective”.

“This notion that the solution to every economic problem is to force more women to have more babies is deeply misogynistic,” Bajaj said. “It reduces women to baby-making vessels. We don’t look at them as individuals. We look at children as commodities, future taxpayers rather than people who deserve to be brought into a planet with their own needs met. While the elderly are a burden… This productive and unproductive narrative is very harmful in general, rather than viewing the population as people who deserve to live in a thriving environment.”

She added: “It feels like the crisis framing needs to be flipped. We should be talking about the real crisis people are facing today in terms of not having their basic survival needs met.”