The Dragon and the Elephant

How many of us recall the significance of the 11^th of July? I am sure many do not. It was not many years ago that this day was celebrated with mini-marathons, speeches by Health Ministers and sometimes by Chief Ministers or even Prime Minister. This was one day I have been called for a TV panel discussion more than once. Having deftly put myself into the frame let me now take the cat out of the bag. Yes, for those who guessed correctly, 11^th of July is World Population Day. A day when doomsday predictions of how rapidly India’s population is growing is reinforced along with the seemingly inconsolable fact that the day is nigh when our population will storm past that of China.  It is another national obsession with the Chinese dragon that we simply cannot get out of our head.

Most educated Indians seem convinced that China has got their ‘population’ problem sorted while we Indians got it all wrong. Many admire the ‘one-child policy’ that China adopted in the 1970’s and see that as singularly responsible for the economic growth that China was later able to achieve. Any discussion on poverty, ill-health, poor educational status and even urban chaos, crowd or traffic jams is often reduced to being a population problem and comparisons are made with China’s efficient solution through its one-child policy.

India adopted a different approach to the population issue. Instead of focusing on the number of children, we focused on boosting family planning. In the 70’s the famous ‘camp approach’ was born. Thousands were sterilized in camps spread across several days. During the 18 months of Emergency roughly 12 million sterilization operations took place. This translates to roughly 25000 every working day for one and a half years. Since men were ‘targets’ they revolted and brought down the government when elections were held after Emergency was lifted. In the 80’s a ‘20-point programme’ was introduced, and all social benefit programmes were linked to the couple having a sterilization operation. Government functionaries from the lowly village worker to the Collector from the elite IAS, had their performance measured through their achievement of family planning ‘targets’. By this time technological improvements made sterilization operations for women easier, and they were far more compliant targets faced with the double disadvantage of poverty and patriarchy.

Meanwhile the camp approach continued, and millions of poor women were sterilized in hurriedly organized sterilization camps in schools, community halls and any space that was available. Few records remain of the consequences of such shoddily done surgery, but there are many records of doctors crooning over how simple the procedure was and how they completed hundreds of surgeries a day.  

Somehow the camp and sterilization approach coupled with the carrot and stick of targets and incentives didn’t seem to be delivering the anticipated results. And from the 90’s onwards the idea of a ‘two-child norm’ was repeatedly suggested as a policy measure. It was also quietly adopted across many states in different ways. Government officials were given increments or had their promotions blocked depending upon the number of children they had. Many states made having less than two children a necessary condition for standing in panchayat elections. The national scheme for promoting safe motherhood called Janani Suraksha Yojana made it a necessary condition for receiving any cash benefits. In some states, irrigation facilities were regulated through the ‘two-child norm’. This year Assam introduced the two-child norm with the stated objective of trying to help the minority community. At the time of writing the UP government has also drafted a Bill to introduce the two-child norm in the state.

While states in India have been pushing the two-child norm, China has quietly withdrawn its two-child policy. Several years into the one-child regime China realized that couples were opting for sex-selection during pregnancy and aborting if they discovered that the foetus was female. So, the one-child policy was relaxed, and couples having a daughter as their first child were allowed to have a second child. As the children who were born during the one and two child regimes grew up, China realized that there was an acute shortage of girls for their sons to marry. This social phenomenon was called ‘bare-branches’ comparing families to bare branches which would dry and die out. After a few more years the one-child policy was universally removed and couples, were encouraged to have two children. Meanwhile the economic revolution took place in China. With a large young labour force, the factories were humming, and Chinese products stormed all over the world. In little time the dragon had become the second largest economy of the world.

This year, while the whole world has been occupied with the Covid pandemic, there were two announcements. The first was that the Chinese had eradicated poverty, and second that they were now abandoning the two-child norm.

There are some lessons in these announcements that we who are constantly in a sibling rivalry with the other Asian giant cannot afford to ignore. An obvious association could be that if poverty is eradicated, population no longer remains a problem, so restrictions no longer remain necessary. But this is not the case, at least when applied to India. Contrary to all our assumptions, the population growth rate in India has been declining over the decades. Across a vast majority of Indian states, the fertility rate is below replacement level. Recent data shows that the decline in population growth rate is taking place uniformly across states and population groups. Contrary to what the political leadership in Assam believes, the rate of decline of fertility is more rapid among Muslims compared to Hindus. Clearly the decline in population growth rate has not affected poverty nor our popular perception.

China has been slowly relaxing its population related norms over the years, as it realizes some of the adverse consequences. The first adverse consequence was on the birth rate of girls. Like India, son-preference is common in China. In India we are also faced with the problem in the decline in the birth of girls. Haryana was a state which removed the two-child norm when it realized this, however this lesson has not yet reached its neighbouring state Rajasthan, which continues to have the norm despite being plagued by the problem of declining sex ratio. Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh too removed the two-child norm after facing similar problems.

There are some other problems that have been seen when the two-child norm is applied to panchayat elections. When this norm is applied to panchayat elections, younger candidates are systematically eliminated. This norm is applied prospectively, which means it applies to any third child born in the future. Thus, older men and women with six or seven children are eligible to stand for election, while younger candidates with a third child are barred. A study of disqualified candidates in MP and Rajasthan, some years ago, found they included a large proportion of first-time candidates, women and Dalits. In a cruel twist of fate, a young woman in her thirties, was disqualified only to be replaced by a 60 year-old woman with six children. Clearly this norm keeps the older more entrenched leadership in place and discourages younger socially disadvantaged aspirants. The study also found that women aspiring to be PRI leaders also faced other pressures. When faced with the choice of either a third child or continuing to remain a panchayat representative, the choice was in favour of motherhood. This was not the same for men, who had in some cases disowned the child and in others sought an abortion when his wife had become pregnant. In some cases, the third born was given away in adoption to family members and in an extreme case hidden from public view, which meant that the child had also not been immunized.

The reason why China has now removed the two-child norm and will henceforth encourage couples to have more children lies elsewhere. While the growth of population is often seen as an ‘explosion’ the reduction of population is less dramatic. One interesting fact is that population can grow in two measures – the first at the level of the family and the second at the level of the larger community. While growth in one automatically reflects in growth in the other the reverse is not true. Thus, in India while family sizes have been declining steadily over the last three or more decades, the population size keeps on increasing. One obvious reason is longer lifespans, but that is not a sufficient explanation why the numbers don’t seem to decline. The more important reason is a phenomenon referred to as population ‘momentum’. As time goes on, children born earlier start becoming reproducing adults.  Thus, in India, the many children born in the 80’s and 90’s are reproducing adults today. Even if every one of them has two children or less the total number of children being born will remain high, because the number and proportion of couples is much higher than earlier. India still has a growing population, but counterintuitively it is not because couples have more children but because there are many more couples now that earlier.

China is now facing the consequences of their rapid population decline in more ways than one. First, they had an acute shortage in girls and women. Now they don’t have enough children being born. In India we still don’t see the population decline because we don’t appreciate the slowing momentum. The population in China on the other hand has not just stopped growing it has started shrinking. To many it may seem like an admirable situation. The population will now going to go back to what it was earlier, and everything will be great. They see visions of much more resources available for fewer to share. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. We need to look a little further East to Japan to see what happens if the population growth declines rapidly.

The Japanese government had a tradition of giving out silver plaques to centenarians. As the number of centenarians grew, the plaques become lighter. Soon there was a question whether this tradition was affordable anymore. It is not that there are more older people because life expectancy has increased. But as growth rates decline, the number and proportion of younger people also declines. Soon the ratio of young productive people to older retired people changes and the country has many more pensioners than taxpayers. Demographers call this number the ‘dependency ratio’ and Japan faced a reversal of its dependency ratio, and years of stagflation. China has taken a quick lesson and hence this turnaround on its much-loved population policy.

The two-child policy is popular with our political leaders and with the educated middle class. Earlier this year it was the state of Assam and now it is UP, where the leadership want to generate political brownie points despite its proven adverse impacts. The only short-term benefit is that it feeds off a minority bashing mindset, that is popular in present times. Data shows such policies are unnecessary because fertility rates are down across the country. It is also ineffective and potentially harmful for many. What we need instead, is a stronger focus on building our population resource, that is train our youth, improve their skills and competencies. We still have a few more years to cash our demographic dividend, after that we will have fewer options.

The Chinese have a mythical animal the dragon as their icon. We in India cannot decide whether the elephant, the peacock or the tiger, magnificent animals all, represents our true spirit. The Chinese with their many faults have proven to be pragmatic with their population policies. We in India, are confused, whether to continue to live in the past, believe in myths and promote population policies that are not only dated but have also proven to be harmful. Can we ever catch up?