Numbers game: On the State of World Population Report 2023 and the India projection

CategorySocial

Last Updated22/04/2023

The latest State of World Population Report, 2023 an authoritative analysis by the UN, has officially stamped what has been known for a while: that India will become the most populous country in mid 2023, surpassing China’s 142.5 crore by about 3 million.

Mortality and Fertility:
Crude Death Rate (CDR): The CDR — the number of persons dying per year per 1,000 population
Life Expectancy at Birth: the overall mortality level of a population.
Total Fertility Rate (TFR): the number of babies an average woman bears over her lifetime

In the ‘socialist’ era, the growing population was a convenient excuse to explain India’s poverty and the state’s inability to improve average standards of living.
These seeded deranged ‘sterilisation’ programmes that violently compromised dignity and freedom.
Globalisation and the opening up of the economy in the 1990s saw India as a vast, untapped market, with ‘fortunes at the bottom of the pyramid’ that framed population as an advantage.

India will continue to have one of the world’s youngest populations until 2030. Currently, in a demographic window of opportunity – a “youth bulge,” will last until 2025 thus, prospecting to reap the demographic dividend – share of the working-age population will peak at 57% towards the mid-2030s.
More working-age population means more tax revenues and thereby more saving potential which will increase growth rate. A relatively lower number of those needing care such as the elderly and young children.

Despite overtaking China, India’s population growth is slowing. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) reported in 2021 that the total fertility rate had, for the first time, dipped to below the replacement level fertility (RLF) of 2.1
Having the most people on the planet could prove to be a big negative for India unless it can provide food, education, housing, health services and jobs to its people.
The effect of overpopulation is serious enough on the environment, and on top of that, overpopulation can also affect the economy of a country.
Can lead to exploitation of natural sources because more the people, the more the usage.
India’s income rate gets viciously affected by overpopulation. Not only does the income drop, but it also fails to recover from the failure.
The number of jobs, employment sources, and scope of expansion in different sectors are not able to keep pace with the country’s overpopulation or increase in numbers.
Earlier population debates did not account for the climate crisis and the fact that many migrants, afteryears of skilled and unskilled labour abroad, were becoming permanent immigrants.
Over 16 lakh Indians have renounced citizenship since 2011, including 2 lakh people in 2022, the highest during the period.

While the pendulum of opinion regarding population has swung from ‘disadvantage’ to ‘advantage’ in national discourse, it is relevant to analyse the question while factoring in newer developments.
Economic opportunity, more than national pride, shapes the working population’s aspiration and, in its absence, a naturally decelerating population will be of limited advantage.