Editorial: Challenges of population growth

It’s no brainer that population growth adversely impacts economic prosperity. The latest ‘World Population Prospects 2022’ report says India is on course to becoming the world’s most populous country. The population is projected to be 1.429 billion next year when China would have 1.426 billion people. By 2050, it is estimated that India will have […]

It’s no brainer that population growth adversely impacts economic prosperity. The latest ‘World Population Prospects 2022’ report says India is on course to becoming the world’s most populous country. The population is projected to be 1.429 billion next year when China would have 1.426 billion people. By 2050, it is estimated that India will have 1.668 billion people, far ahead of China’s population, which will drop to 1.317 billion. Overtaking China as the most populous nation will pose a new set of challenges for policymakers. The government’s welfare schemes will have to factor in the rising numbers and the availability of resources to ensure that all eligible beneficiaries are covered. Healthcare, housing and education sectors, in particular, will come under greater strain. India might have made significant strides in population control in recent years, but there is no room for complacency. The United Nations has lauded India for bringing down the fertility rate — the average number of children per woman —slowly and smoothly, in sharp contrast to China’s oppressive policies that had proved counter-productive. In States where the fertility rate is above the replacement level of 2.1 — the rate at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next —, the standard of living is poor. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Meghalaya, Jharkhand and Manipur are among the laggards in terms of per capita income because their fertility rate was found to be above the replacement level of 2.1, as per the report of the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), released in May.

India has done well over the past few decades in terms of population control with the total fertility rate declining from 2.2 to 2 at the national level. The fact that Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists have fertility rates well below the national average can be largely attributed to economic security among the members of these communities. However, what makes population control a more vexed issue in India is the religious polarisation around it. The bogey of population explosion is often used to politically target Muslims. Be it Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma or his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath, there is a tendency among the BJP leaders to point fingers at the Muslim community on the issue of population control. The recent spat between Adityanath and AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi illustrates the problem of looking at the population issue from the prism of religion. The overall contraceptive prevalence rate in the country has risen from 54% to 67% while the aim should be to improve it substantially through an intensive and extensive awareness programme about the use of modern methods of contraception. Once population growth reaches an unmanageable level, socio-economic development will be derailed. India can’t afford to let that happen.

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