With the latest United Nations report on global population predicting that India will surpass China in terms of number of people in 2023, population control has once again become a buzzword in the Indian political ecosystem. The UN report, released on July 11, says by 2050 India’s population will reach 166.8 crore, while China’s population will be 131.7 crore. The findings of the report, which also says India’s population will begin to decline after 2064, have sparked a debate in many quarters over whether India needs to act aggressively on its population policy programmes. The UN report has come at a time when several states including UP, MP, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Tripura and Assam are considering laws to control the population growth.
Last year, the Uttar Pradesh Law Commission had submitted a draft of the Uttar Pradesh Population Bill, to incentivise families to follow a two-child norm. Apart UP, other states like Assam and Karnataka also wanted to pursue population policies to actively discourage families having more than two children, deploying penalties such as exclusion from welfare schemes and from eligibility for government jobs. While many have characterised the UN report as evidence that India’s population is exploding and could only be controlled through a stringent law, some have tried to blame the Muslim community for driving the numbers. Not surprisingly, some political leaders have even demanded a population control law. But the question is whether India faces a serious population problem. And does India need a population control policy?
Official counts suggest India’s population is not exploding; on the contrary, the population growth rate is already on a decline. On an average, women in most states have been having fewer children than before, thus effectively flattening the growth curve. Fertility rate has dipped below replacement levels – 2.1 births per woman – from 3.4 in 1992-93 to 2.0 in 2019-21, according to National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5). Increased awareness, government programmes, urbanisation, upward mobility and greater use of modern contraceptive methods have all contributed to this. India’s fertility rate was 2.2 at the last official count in 2016. The trend across India over the past decade has been a steady decline in the reproductive rate with the southern states registering a steep decline than the Hindi-speaking heartland states in the north.
Family health experts are of the view that while the quantum increase in population size will continue till 2050, as per current projection India’s population will also start stabilising around the same time. Not only the perception that India’s population is exploding and we need to control it as resources are limited is misplaced, the widespread misinformation that India’s Muslim population is increasing exponentially is plain propaganda. Data suggests that not only the fertility rate is decreasing but population growth rate is also falling across all religions and communities. Different Indian states are at different stages of demographic transition. The NFHS-5 statistics show that there are five states – Bihar, Meghalaya, UP, Jharkhand and Manipur – with higher fertility rate than replacement level. Fertility decline has a direct relationship with education and empowerment of women and access to health and family planning services besides overall socio-economic development.
Coercive population control measures have never worked and India should learn from the mistakes of China, which had enforced a one-child policy but had to abandon it later because of population crisis. In the early years of the Indian republic, population control was an accepted part of the national policy. But after the disastrous experience of the mass sterilisation campaign during the Emergency years, population control became politically toxic. Instead, a new narrative took hold: population control is a function of increase in incomes, reduction in poverty and a general rise in prosperity. Limitation of population growth is also the result of spread of education, particularly female education, later marriages and increased participation of women in the labour force. This has been the experience of other developing economies; this has also been the case with Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have high female literacy rates and relative greater female empowerment.
Experts say a population control policy for contemporary India has little justification in logic or facts because India is well on its way to completing its demographic transition and therefore, should stop fretting about population problem. Instead, it should focus on the demographic dividend and needs to invest heavily in education, healthcare and skill development. It needs to create jobs for millions of unemployed youths, rather than attempting legislation to control population, given that, experts say, India is at a perfect stage of population distribution. Since India has entered the demographic dividend, it needs to put in place policies and institutions that will create jobs for young and active workforce to catapult India out of poverty. After all, demographic dividend can be taken advantage of only if the young and productive section of the population can be gainfully employed.
Family health experts are of the view that India should go beyond numbers and think about its people. For instance, according to NFHS-5 data, about 22 million women want to stop or delay child bearing but do not have access to a method of contraception. Thus, India needs to focus on providing women access to family planning. There is still another decade, according to experts, when the demographic dividend may still be available for India to take advantage of, which will need policies to expand labour-intensive manufacturing to transform India into a base for low-labour-cost economic activity. This is what happened in China and now unfolding in Vietnam and Bangladesh.
The key problem India faces is not population growth but lack of jobs and high-quality employment. Population control through State action did not work in India and is unlikely to do so now. Instead, we should focus on education, better healthcare, expansion of women workforce and job creation.
