Numbers game: On the State of World Population Report 2023 and the India projection
India needs to create economic opportunities to reap the demographic dividend
The latest State of World Population Report, 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. These estimates are based on official country data as well as extrapolating birth, mortality and international migration trends. India has had a vacillating relationship with the size of its population. 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’s large working age population — or the demographic dividend — relative to the developed countries, where the workforce was ageing, has provided labour-wage arbitrage and valuable economic opportunities. Indian numbers are behind the skilled and unskilled labour that power workforces in West Asia and Africa, undergird business process outsourcing projects from developed European countries and the United States, and are increasingly a significant component of university enrolment abroad.
This relative prosperity, though unable to solve India’s crisis of economic inequality, has, however, busted the myth of forced sterilisation and legal limits on family sizes being key to population control. Despite overtaking China, India’s population growth is slowing. The National Family Health Survey reported in 2021 that the total fertility rate had, for the first time, dipped to below the replacement level of 2.1. India’s population is forecast to grow from its current 1.4 billion to 1.67 billion in 2050 before settling at 1.53 billion in 2100, with the peak at 1.7 billion sometime in 2064, according to UN estimates. 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. Earlier population debates did not account for the climate crisis and the fact that many migrants, after years of skilled and unskilled labour abroad, were becoming permanent immigrants : over 16 lakh Indians have renounced citizenship since 2011, including 2,25,620 people in 2022, the highest during the period, the External Affairs Minister told Parliament in February. 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.