Poonam Muttreja is the executive director of the Population Foundation of India.
India is poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next month, with the latter experiencing a demographic retreat for the first time in decades.
The milestone is more than just symbolic. With the largest cohort of people in the world, there will likely be noteworthy socioeconomic consequences for India, with opportunities and challenges at hand, such as a large population of young people aspiring to get a good education, acquire valuable skills and become gainfully employed. To navigate this future, India must look at China’s successes and missteps to learn what to do and what not to do.
As predicted by demographers, the Chinese population is growing old. The proportion of people 60 and older was 17.84 per cent in 2020, up from 12.76 per cent in 2010. This may be attributed to the long-established evidence that as socioeconomic development takes place, death and birth rates go down and stabilize at a reasonably low level, to the point that society is simply maintaining an acceptable net replacement rate.
In recent decades, China relied largely on coercive measures to restrict population growth. It introduced the one-child policy in the late 1970s, before scrapping it in 2016 to allow families to have two children. In 2021, it relaxed its child policy yet again to allow couples to have as many as three children.
India must keep in mind the inefficacy of coercive population control measures while it looks to address demographic challenges in a few states of its own. The populations of Sikkim, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Puducherry, Punjab, Ladakh, West Bengal and Lakshadweep are all becoming increasingly elderly, with total fertility rates (TFR) below the replacement level. (TFR is the average number of children a woman is likely to give birth to.) This will result in an age-structural transformation wherein states will reap demographic dividends at first but will be left with an aging population in the long run. Going forward, these states will have to dedicate an enormous amount of resources to address the financial and health care needs of the elderly.
A different approach will be needed for states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the TFR is higher than the national average. Here, India must remember the downsides of China’s coercive policies and the benefits of its aggressive human development investments.
The link between higher development and a decline in TFR is clearly borne out by India’s southern states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Widespread deprivation, inequality and social and gender discrimination adversely affect population stabilization. With increased access to education, economic and other development opportunities, fertility decline is a natural demographic phenomenon that those southern states have achieved without coercive policies.
Today, India enjoys the advantage of having a large population of young people. Every fifth person is an adolescent (10 to 19 years old), and every third person is young (10 to 24). Their potential to contribute to India’s development and economic growth is profound. Investing in them is the best way to leverage the country’s competitive advantage – its demographic dividend.
Skilled Indian youth can also support countries with negative growth rates. India has already made such an arrangement with Japan. It could replicate and refine the model with other countries, map job demands, undertake skills gap analysis, mutually recognize vocational degrees and address the legal issues surrounding employment and immigration. To do this on a larger scale, India will have to place young people at the centre of its policies, investments and programs, aligning them with the demographic shifts both at home and elsewhere in the world. This is an opportunity India must take full advantage of.
Considering the size of the population and its demographic diversity, a differential planning approach is essential. For states that are lagging in the demographic transition, ensuring universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health information and services is important, as are providing education and vocational skills for young people and addressing discriminatory practices against women, girls and gender minorities. In the demographically advanced states in the south, policies and programs should focus on helping the aging population and creating a good work environment for migrant workers.
Finally, we should not be concerned about a population “explosion” in India. The country is on course to achieve population stabilization by the middle of the century (2048), close to the long-term objective of its national population policy to achieve a stable population by 2045. (The picture should become clearer next year, when India conducts a new census; its last one was done in 2011.)
India can bask in its success of having reduced population growth on the strength of development-based policies, not coercion. The country now has the opportunity to expedite the provision of universal family planning coverage. This will further empower women and help them realize their reproductive and sexual rights. A large proportion of girls and women lack autonomy over their bodies when it comes to making choices about marriage and reproduction. This has to change.