the so called demographic dividend

an interesting viewpoint

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S U B V E R S E
Plenty is not pretty
Rahul Singh

In his otherwise perceptive book, Imagining India, IT entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani has sadly got it completely wrong as far as our population problem is concerned.
He argues, “With growth, our human capital has emerged as a vibrant source of workers and consumers not just for India, but also for the global economy... Since independence, India struggled for decades with policies that tried to put the lid on its surging population. It is only recently that the country has been able to look its billion in the eye and consider its advantages.”
He refers to these advantages as India’s ‘demographic dividend’, a phrase made fashionable by two demographers, David Bloom and Jeffrey Williamson. They studied the economic success stories of some East Asian countries, in particular Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. They found that one of the reasons for their success, which had hitherto been ignored, was, paradoxically, population growth. “Between 1950 and 2000, the chances that an infant would die in East Asia fell sharply from 181 per 1,000 births to just 34, and this caused fertility to fall from six children to two per woman,” they wrote.
But there was a lag between these two drops. Child deaths fell first, while fertility remained high. It took some time for people to realise that fewer babies were dying. Only then did people adjust to lower fertility. And the children who unexpectedly survived formed a “boom generation”, they further explained. This created a large number of young enterprising workers, i.e. the demographic dividend.
The East Asian example cannot be transposed on the Indian case to explain this country’s economic success in the last two decades, particularly in the IT area. The fact of the matter is that there are huge differences between the East Asian experience and India’s. In countries like Taiwan and South Korea — even Thailand and Indonesia to a lesser extent — two essential social parameters were put in place before population growth began to decline: literacy and health care. A great deal of investment was made in primary education and public health, leading to literacy rates of over 80 per cent and average life expectancy — which is the best indicator of good health care — of over 75 years.
In India, on the other hand, there has been no such investment in primary education or public health, with the result that our literacy rate is only a little over 60 per cent and the average life expectancy is around 64. We have one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the developing world, outside sub-Saharan Africa. India’s population increase has largely been among the poorer and least educated sections of its people. Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, UP and Rajasthan account for 40 per cent of the country’s population and 50 per cent of its population growth. They also happen to be our nation’s most backward states, with low literacy rates and poor health care.
And when you think of it, how come there has been no such demographic dividend in Pakistan, where the population growth rate has been even higher than in India? At the time of our independence, our population was 350 million. Today, it is almost 1.2 billion. Fortunately, food production has more than tripled in the same period thanks mainly to the Green Revolution; hence there have been no mass famines. Though fertility rates have admittedly come down from over six children per woman to around three, there are still about 18 million people added to our population every year. They have to be fed, educated and housed. This is an unsustainable burden on the Indian economy. It has led to massive environmental damage. Our exploding cities and a growing culture of violence can also be largely traced to our increasing numbers.

A major priority of whichever government comes to power must be to make greater efforts towards stabilising our population growth and promoting family planning. It would be a great pity if the next government thought otherwise.