News items about population growth are sure to grab a lot of attention. For the government, it means planning, and for the public, it concerns sharing resources. For the groups with a vested interest, it is all about the ‘others’ and the potential threat they become to ‘us’. India is no exception.
That is why the news about India’s fertility rate falling below the replacement rate is very important. According to the latest National Family Health Survey 2019-21, the number of children per fertile woman in India is 2.0. In other words, from now on, the number of children born can’t match the number of parents (which is two!).
Was it a sudden phenomenon that no one knew coming? False. The fertility rate has been on a free fall since 1960—from about 5.9 to what we have today! Now, leave this post and click this Gapminder link.
Then why has the population been increasing all these years? Surely not because children were going up or the old were living longer. It is because the number of adults has been going up. To understand this, you should know the shape of India’s demography.
This population pyramid is from 2011, but an older version is not expected to be hugely dissimilar. We can do the math in another post, but remember this. Children of today (say 0 to 20 years) have to fill the large neck that appears in the pyramid. The people getting out of the system due to old age are from an even narrower side.
National Family Health Survey, India
Factfulness, Hans Rosling
Census of India 2011
