We have written several articles and book chapter on this question. It is important to foster Education in order to increase real Production per capita without increasing damage to the environment. See Entry 46, of year 2021, at our Blog on World Development, https://euroamericanassociation.blogspot.com

Dr Maria Carmen Guisan thank you for your contribution to the discussion

Yes, population growth increases the need to produce consumer products and this need, in turn, intensifies the trend to over-exploit and misuse environmental resources. Overpopulation means that the ecosystem has more number of organisms than it can sustain. If an ecosystem is overpopulated it will face many problems most importantly scarcity of food and place. To sustain such a big population there will be deforestation which will eventually lead to pollution. Overpopulation is the state whereby the human population rises to an extent exceeding the carrying capacity of the ecological setting. In an overpopulated environment, the numbers of people might be more than the available essential materials for survival such as transport, water, shelter, food or social amenities. The increasing population numbers and growing affluence have resulted in rapid growth of energy production and consumption in India. The environmental effects like ground water and surface water contamination; air pollution and global warming are of growing concern owing to increasing consumption levels. Consequences include increased poverty, overcrowding, famine, weather extremes, species loss, acute and chronic medical illnesses, war and human rights abuses, and an increasingly unstable global situation that portends Malthusian chaos and disaster. More people require more resources, which mean that as the population increases, the Earth's resources deplete more rapidly. The result of this depletion is deforestation and loss of biodiversity as humans strip the Earth of resources to accommodate rising population numbers. Population growth alongside increased consumption is a driver of environmental concerns, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, due to overexploitation of natural resources for human development. Overpopulation of humans leads to deforestation which is responsible for climatic change. The more the population, the demand for resources and food grows. This leads to an over-exploitation of resources. The population surge has had significant effects on India's rising pollution due to the overexploitation of forests for their natural resources. The vast population is severely impacting the overall forest canopy density in the nation. As per a study by Nature Journal, India has 35 billion trees spread across 2,261km². In countries with relatively high income and inequality due to the increase in the income of the wealthiest population, inequality positively affects growth through fiscal policy. The negative effect of inequality on economic growth is due to increased social protection expenditures. In India, the share of the national income of the bottom 50% has decreased by around 40% since 1980. In contrast, the share of the national income of the top 10% has increased by around 80% and the share of the top 1% has increased by around 180% since 1980. Furthermore, this chapter finds that economic growth has a far greater impact on poverty alleviation than inequality. Therefore, given India's stage of development, India must continue to focus on economic growth to lift the poor out of poverty by expanding the overall pie. For higher levels of poverty, we find that inequality negatively impacts economic growth. The negative effect of inequality on economic growth grows as poverty rises.