Revisiting the Population Conundrum in the era of Resilience

This year the theme of the World Population Day is about resilient futures and choices. On the 11^th of July 1987, the population of the world was estimated to have exceeded 5 billion and this became so much a cause for concern the world over, that first the UNDP and then the UN General Assembly declared the 11^th of July as the World Population Day. In India subsequently the numbers game became an immensely important issue and tied to many doomsday prophesies. The Population Clock became a common sight and reminder in several places across the country. On 11^th May 2000, Astha Arora born in Safdarjang Hospital in Delhi was celebrated as the billionth baby in India, and recently I saw a Population Clock in the Lucknow University campus proclaiming that our current population was over 1.4 billion.

Many people in India, particularly our politicians, continue to obsess about ‘over population’, but it may be timely to review how things have changed in the 35 years since the day was first observed and recalibrate our concerns. In these 35 years, the world population has increased to nearly eight billion, but the growth rate has declined by nearly half, from 1.8 percent to about 1 percent. In India, the growth rate is declined even more sharply from 2.2 percent to less than 1 percent now. While globally the average or per capita GDP has increased about four times in these years, in India the increase has been much more dramatic and average or per capita has grown nearly 7 times. Families too have become much smaller; with the number of children each Indian woman has during her lifetime reducing from about 4.4 in 1987 to less than 2.1 now. Indeed, India has breached the magic number of Total Fertility Rate (TFR) 2.1 very recently. This means fewer children are being born than the number of parents who had these children. Thus, each succeeding generation will be smaller than its previous one. This has been the ‘demographers dream’, at least in India.   

This ‘dream come true’ will unfortunately not result in reduced crowds or traffic jams or the shutting down of maternity homes any time soon. And this is because population is not just about numbers or growth rates. For some more years India will continue to face the apparent contradiction of reducing population growth rates but increasing birth numbers. This is because the nature of the Indian population has changed completely in these last thirty-five years. From a population with a substantial proportion of infants and children, we are now a population with an exceptionally large proportion of reproducing youth. Thus, we have many more couples and even though each couple has far fewer children than earlier, the numbers add up. And therefore, it appears that the population of India is continuing to grow and ‘add an Australia to it each year’, to use a popular phrase. But it is important to remember that coercive laws for family size restrictions are not only unnecessary at this time but may end up actually being counterproductive if couples hurry having their two babies earlier to qualify under such laws.

Today as we stand in the shadow of the pandemic, we find that the fertility rates and population growth rates have reduced and the GDP despite hiccups has increased substantially over the years. What then are our population concerns in 2022? To understand the current situation, at least in India, we need to recognize that ‘population’ is ultimately about people and their well-being and not just their numbers. While Indians are on an average richer and healthier than before, the material conditions of a large proportion of Indians continues to be of grave concern, and not just because of the pandemic. In India, we seem only to celebrate GDP growth and trillion-dollar economies while ignoring several other indicators which would provide a more nuanced picture. Take for example the Human Development Index (HDI) a composite index calculated based on health, educational and standard of living indicators. India’s rank on the global list of countries was 131 among 189 in 2020.While the number of billionaires in India is growing rapidly, the number of poor makes the bulk of India’s population. In a recent article noted economist Jayati Ghosh called India a Poor Country with an Affluent Elite.

Inequality, indignity, and insecurity are probably the biggest concerns of the sizable proportion of the population in this country. Income or wealth related inequality is just one dimension of the economic inequalities. People living in large swathes of the country have huge deficit in opportunities. The migration crisis that unfolded during Covid provided ample evidence of how people who come crowding to the cities are doing so because they do not have economic opportunities back home.

I have been living in a village in the Himalayas for the last one year. The area is not poor, but the youth have no income opportunities beyond migration. Government schools have proliferated in the last thirty years, but the local college, which has been established in the last five years, does not offer any science or commerce courses. There are few opportunities for any technical or vocational training before the nearest big town two hours away. This automatically means that the cost of education and training increases manifold because the students cannot stay at home and study, an opportunity available to even to poor city dwellers. Yet as city dwellers we keep cursing the crowds thinking of it as a ‘population problem’ related to sheer numbers of people, rather than an issue of unequal opportunities.

No conversation around population is possible without discussing fertility and contraception and women’s reproductive roles. Today the fertility rates are down, and contraceptive rates are higher, but women continue to shoulder the entire burden of reproduction. Educational achievements among girls has increased substantially, child marriage is coming down, women are joining the workforce, and women’s empowerment is becoming real. However, gender inequality continues in diverse ways. Men in refuse to take contraceptive responsibilities, and the government programmes continue to focus on women’s contraception. Childcare is still seen as the sole responsibility of women, in fact even in middle class families, professionally trained women leave their jobs after having a child. In India men’s involvement in care work, or contributions to the substantial number of activities needed for running a home are among the lowest in the world. Achieving greater gender parity in India may not be possible without explicitly bringing men into the equation to revisit their own roles in society and start by sharing the unpaid household work including childcare.

One of the abiding insecurities among the privileged in India has been the number and assertiveness of the less privileged. I remember my middle-class family expressed satisfaction during the Emergency in 1975, that not only were trains running on time, but that the numbers of poor would be brought down by the forcible family planning programme. Slums were demolished in Delhi and the poor were removed out of sight to beautify the city. After the Mandal Commission highlighted the abiding nature of caste discrimination in the country, there have been anti-reservation protests from time to time as the erstwhile privileged castes felt that their ‘rightful’ access to opportunities was being reduced. Even today, with reservation for ‘economically weaker sections’ having been introduced a, anti-reservation sentiments are strong among the social media groups of the privileged, in which I am a member.

The one insecurity that has grown manifold in our country and elsewhere is the obsession with homogeneity and purity around ‘identity’: especially the identity as an ‘Indian.’ The idea of ‘unity in diversity’, the strong earlier credo, is now rapidly losing favour. It appears we are increasingly moving toward a ‘one nation, one language, one norm, one kind of food, one manner of praying’ vision. The prescribed norm is seen as not only being desirable and superior but also as the only one that is legitimate. Such is the level of widespread insecurity that anyone who appears as not belonging to the prescribed norm, is seen as a threat. Those who perceive themselves as not being part of this norm are also insecure as they are made to feel like potential outsiders. This is leading to widespread uncertainty manifesting itself in different ways in different people. Fear, coercion, and violence have become necessary corollaries of this overwhelming environment of homogenization.

This year the World Population Day is being observed as the world is recovering from the Covid pandemic and desperately seeks resilience. Over five lakh lives have been lost in our country and millions have been affected; in fact, society at large has been devastated. Resilience in societies is the ability to cope, recover, move on and rediscover itself. Trust, collaboration, and the ability of communities to work together are extremely important for recovery and resilience. If we want to move towards the Population Day theme of resilience, it is necessary for us to make responsible choices. As individuals each one of us needs to recognize the many things that are dividing us and seek ways to increase social cohesion and achieve community resilience. It is not enough to say that the problem lies elsewhere because it would be terrible if we were able to survive the pandemic but collapse as a society.