Drive on any road in an Indian city and the overcrowding is chaotic traffic is exasperating. Take any sort of public transport, bus, train or even flight and every single seat seems occupied – all the time. Wherever we go there are crowds – it is easy to be frustrated and to blame all of our social problems on over-population. But population is actually not as much of an issue for India – our growth rate has slowed down dramatically and there is much good news on the horizon.
Ever since we were children, we were used to seeing coy ‘Nirodh’ ads and persuasive ‘Hum do hamare do’ campaign videos. However all around us we still saw people with large families and we thought all of the well-intentioned campaigns were in vain. They were not. As women got better educated and access to birth control improved, the rate of population growth started to dip and continued to slow down.
A recent report from the NFHS (National Family Health Survey), by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare shows interesting trends. NFHS 4 showed a fertility rate of 2.2 whereas the latest, NFHS5 shows that the nation’s overall fertility rate has fallen below the ‘replacement rate’ of two children per woman. This means that for the first time in our independent history we could be seeing our population increase not because of new babies being born, but because of improved life expectancy. This is actually quite incredible.
The NFHS has more surprises. The community that many think of as the worst offenders in terms of producing more babies and having large families is actually showing the sharpest drop in fertility rates. The Muslim community is often accused of not using family planning and producing too many children. While the absolute fertility rate still remains the highest, the community has also shown the biggest drop: from a fertility rate of 4.4 in NFHS 1(1992-93) to 2.3 in NFHS 5(2019-2021). In the same period the fertility decline of the majority Hindu community was down from 3.3 in 1992-93 to 1.94 in NFHS 5 (2019-2021).
India and China were both facing similar problems of population explosion. While India took a persuasive, democratic approach, China used the draconian and inhuman compulsory one-child family policy to sharply reduce its population. The result is that China now has an ageing population skewed towards more senior citizens. The one-child policy ensured that the country now has an increasing proportion of unproductive seniors who need or will need support. Because families are largely single children families it now falls to one child to cope with the financial, physical and emotional caregiving for both ageing parents.
By contrast, India’s fertility rate has dropped not because of coercive anti-human-rights policies, but due to social awareness and improved access to family planning services. Ours has been a gradual but effective form of population control. In the process, we have created our ‘demographic dividend’. The demographic dividend is defined as "the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger, and 65 and older)".
This dividend means that the country has the potential to grow and increase productivity because there are more people in the workforce in relation to the number of dependents. India has the youngest population in the world while also experiencing declining fertility which puts us in a unique position to reap a demographic dividend. By 2025, India will have the largest proportion of people in the working-age category and there is the potential of adding 2 percentage points per annum to your per capita GDP growth.
However, this is possible if the right educational policies ensure the education and employability of young people. This is possible if government policies take care of future basic minimum living standards including food, water and energy and creates opportunities for employment. This is possible if governments concentrate on work on the ground rather than symbolism. It can happen if we as citizens resolve not to be swayed by distractions and ask for accountability from our elected representatives – about how we are governed and how taxes collected from us are spent and allocated.
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