THE provisional population results of 2011 reveal many facets of the country. As expected, we have grown to 1.21 billion within a decade. The only consolation is that the population growth has shown a sharp decline to 17.6 per cent from 21.5 per cent ten years ago, the lowest growth since 1921. While the world's population was adding 75 million a year, India alone has added 18.1 million annually during these years.
In the developed world, the increase in the population, which was growing rapidly till the middle of the 20th century, has slowed down due to rising incomes and abundant food production and its availability. Improved sanitation has reduced the incidence of infectious diseases. Continued advances in medical sciences have brought down infant mortality (the death rate under 1 year of age) from 1 in 5 births to 1 in 20. The life expectancy at birth rose from 47 years in 1900 to 68 by 1950 in the U.S. With this dramatic reduction in the death rate, the overall population growth rate slowed down. This slowdown corresponded to the decrease in the number of children each woman had. Fertility (the number of children per female of reproductive age) continued to decline so markedly that at the end of the millennium, mothers in most of Europe, North America and Japan were each bearing fewer than two children.
Currently in these areas, two typical parents do not bear enough children to replace themselves, resulting in an absolute population decline excluding, of course, immigration. Till now, death rates have continued to fall, although not as dramatically as in the first half of the 1900s as the diseases of old age such as cancer and heart attacks are more difficult to control.
India has adopted many measures through different programmes of poverty alleviation such as providing food at subsidised rates, health and sanitation missions, education and empowerment of women but with a varying degree of success. The coercive methods applied in the family planning programmes in the 1970s gave a big jolt to the government, making it rethink the policy on population. The result was the Population Policy in 2000. This policy is guided by the fact that a growing population is a serious impediment to development efforts.
When the world population on an average is having an annual growth rate of 1.3 per cent, India is still growing at 1.5 per cent. While we have been able to reduce the death rate to 6.4 per 1,000 persons, the birth rate is still high at 21.76 births per 1,000 population. The fertility rate is as high as 2.72 children born per female. The urge to produce more children lies deep into the various cultural, religious and socio-economic reasons of communities, but the burden of new births is insurmountable considering that already nearly 2 million children under the age of 5 die every year, 55 million under 5 are malnourished, 15 per cent are out of school and thousands live in slums.
Apart from children, women are the worst sufferers. Women continue to deliver babies in their homes and many die at the time of delivery because of inaccessibility to life-saving drugs, blood and money. Some had to deliver babies in toilets and trains. How pathetic it is when teenagers give births to children. For every 1,000 adolescent girls, 68 have already given births. If this was not enough, child marriage, outlawed long ago in the country, is still prevalent in many parts of India as girls are married off before they are 16. Many times women are unable to determine the number and spacing of their children. Unwanted pregnancies persist due to the unmet demand for contraception.
What in the census figures, however, is most disturbing is the emerging skewed sex ratio, which could cast a shadow in the developing society. The rights of women and girls are taken away even before they are born by prenatal sex determination tests and abortion of female foetuses. The results show that the sex ratio for children below 6 years has dropped from 927 in 2001 to a dismal 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. This decline is continuing unabated since 1961 except in a few states.
Proving Malthus and Ricardo wrong about the ability of our country to feed the increasing population, India has emerged instead a food surplus state from a food-deficit state. India is estimated to harvest an all-time record output of 235.88 million tonnes of food grains in 2010-11, sufficient to feed 1.2 billion despite building a comfortable buffer stock.
There are, however, more serious threats in future to the environment, agriculture land, soil productivity, water bodies and rivers, forests and its bio-diversity. The grain area in India is just 650 square metres per person, compared to 1,900 square metres in the United States, and with most available farmland already in cultivation, it is inevitably to shrink due to rapid urbanisation and industrialisation.
Another pressure that looms large is the water situation, which is extremely grave. Already a quarter of the country's agricultural farms are irrigated by pumped aquifers and the rivers are either drying or are loaded with effluents. At the same time about 28 per cent of agricultural land is estimated to be becoming less productive because of erosion, water-logging, desertification and other forms of degradation. According to the World Bank, resource degradation costs the Indian economy 4.5 per cent of the GDP annually.
Considering that India has 35 per cent of its population below the age of 15 and that by 2020 we will have the advantage of having the largest working population in the world, this can by no means become a demographic dividend unless the population is equipped with right skills and resources to participate in capital building. As the population grows, so does unemployment, which is as high as 7.8 per cent.
We need to create at least 10 million jobs for gainful employment annually to meet this challenge. China pulls 1 per cent of its population out of agriculture every year by providing them jobs in the construction and manufacturing sector. Job creation of this scale has not happened in India yet.
Reaping the demographic dividend will mean creating a good human capital through human development initiatives such as education, public health, family planning and economic policies. However, key indicators show that we have fallen short of expectation and rank 134 among 177 countries on the Human Development Index. One-third of our population is still below the poverty line.
The heartening point is that our literacy rate has touched 74 per cent from just 30 per cent after Independence. However, our four high population states accounting for 44 per cent of the country's population -- Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh —have not been able to bring the literacy rate to even 70 per cent.
High population densities have led to overloaded systems and infrastructural stress in our urban areas. More than 25 per cent of the urban population lives without sanitation and 24 per cent without access to tap water. India's 72 per cent population will be urbanised by 2030. At this trajectory, India will require the construction of 3.6 million housing units in each year, besides 66,000 new primary schools and 3,000 new health centres. Good connectivity, sanitation and health services are all more important for the population to function.
To sustain economic growth, it is important, therefore, to stabilise the population growth by implementing a combination of short- and long-term measures, bringing down disparities between different regions, societies and ethnic groups. There can be no two ways to reduce the fertility rate of 2.72 to the replacement level of growth.
Statistics show that India's poorest and most illiterate states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh — have the highest average fertility rate of 4.3. On the other hand, states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have fertility rates equal or slightly higher than the replacement level of 2.1. This has been possible as the governments in these states have focussed on human development, opened up local economies and improved social services.
An improvement in women's and children's health has always brought down infant mortality rates and a decline in child birth rates. Similarly, literacy of women, longer stay in schools tend to decrease fertility rate of women. Indeed, life expectancy of Kerala is higher than that of China's 71 years. The female-male ratio of Kerala is again 1.06 which is comparable to China's 0.94 and exactly as it is in North America and Western Europe. In South Korea, two factors planned by the government have brought a rapid "demographic transition". First, the population became urbanised as they were given jobs and second, the government gave high priority to birth control education and contraceptive use. The high literacy rate was another important factor to bring the demographic advantage.
There is need, therefore, to shift the population policy objectives in favour of human development in India at the earliest. Fewer children also mean more income for parents and more spending by the nation on physical capital. Declining fertility means more women can join the workforce, reducing the dependency further. More workers mean more savings, which can fund more investment. The economic advantage of a workforce is so large that some economists attribute a sharp growth of the GDP to the increase in the working force. As human development brings up good human capital, the resurgent economic growth will bring in more employment, more income, more food and less poverty. Thus by focussing on human development, India can reap the demographic dividend that no other country can hope.
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