An Indian model that’s better than China’s

News: The National Family Health Survey 5 indicates that India has defused the population bomb without adopting any extreme measures like the One Child policy.

What does the variation of status in TFR indicate?

According to NFHS 5, India’s Total Fertility Rate or the average number of children per woman has dropped to 2 below the replacement level (2.1 estimated by WHO).

NFHS 5 showed an increase in the proportion of women using modern contraceptive methods from 47.8% in 2015-16 to 56.5% in 2019-21, a decrease in the unmet need for family planning and improvement in family planning services.

The states with the highest TFR like Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh also have the lowest proportion of literate women and women who have completed 10 years of schooling. They are also the states ranked lowest in the Niti Aayog’s latest multi-dimensional poverty index.

This is a clear indication of the importance of underlying characteristics such as level of women’s education, their average marital age, access to contraceptive services etc on population control measures.

What is the difference between China’s and India’s policies?

China and India, both had a TFR of 6 in the 1950s, but China reached below-replacement fertility levels by 1990 through a one-child policy. This has resulted in disastrous demographic consequences such as a rapidly ageing population, a skewed gender ratio as people aborted or abandoned female babies, and a shrinking labor force with too few young people to support the elderly.

However, like India, countries such as Bangladesh, Brazil, Turkey, and Malaysia, which started off with TFRs of 6 or more achieved replacement level fertility without such coercive policies.

What lessons should states need to learn?

India’s decadal growth rate reached as high as 24.8% in the 1960s and 24.7% in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady decline in population growth. 2011 census showed that for the first time since 1900 India added fewer people to its population in a decade than in the previous decade.

Despite this refined, overpopulation is described as a cause of countries ills. Many states have introduced punitive measures, such as not letting people in more than two children contest local elections. Such penalty measures could even be counter-productive. There is need to reduce population not stigmatize it.

Source: This post is based on the article ” An Indian model that’s better than China’s” published in the Times of India on 29th November 2021.