THE LONG VIEW

What if the roots of today’s unmatched millions were sown not in discrimination alone, but in the silent arithmetic of survival and timing? In India, over 39 million men may never marry—not because women are absent, but because they were born into a demographic trap: too many men from high-fertility eras chasing too few women from smaller, healthier, but less numerous cohorts. This imbalance, now visible in Kerala as much as in Punjab, reveals a profound truth: social systems operate on biological time, and when we disrupt fertility patterns, the consequences echo decades later in the form of loneliness, migration, and unrest. The Surplus Groom Index uncovers not just a present shortage, but a future already written in the past’s birth registers—where every child who survived under-five became a silent participant in a marriage market they never knew they’d be excluded from. And this isn’t India’s unique fate; it’s a script replayed wherever fertility falls too fast, from Mao’s China to Malthus’s England (Caldwell, 1982). The difference today is that we can see it coming—and still, we act as if demography were destiny, not design. —Dr. Helena Chan-Whitfield