The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that India’s population will reach its peak by 2050, with the fertility ratio (the average live births per woman between 15 to 49 years of age) already 1.9 — lower than the commonly assumed sustainable level of 2.1. This cheers the hearts of all Indians born before the year 2000 who grew up blaming the growing population for slow economic growth. To put this in context, fertility rates are declining, and the global population is expected to peak before 2100. The global fertility rate in 2025 is 2.2, varying from 1.5 in high-income countries to 3.8 for the least developed countries.
India is ahead in this transition compared to less developed countries, which have an average fertility rate of 2.4. This correlation between development and a lowering of the fertility rate reflects a consensus arrived at since the 1970s.
At the time, explosive population growth created a global “fertility boom”, bringing managing population growth front and centre in development policy, including in India. In the second decade of this century, “population anxiety” has captured the public and political imagination, even in low fertility developed countries, manifesting as anti-immigration activism mixed as a front for maintaining the dominant racial identity.
Even America, the poster boy of immigration-led development, sustained economic growth and innovation since the mid-20th century, and the favoured destination for most Indians, has succumbed to this anxiety.
“Population anxiety” induced coercive population control was most notable in China, with deleterious outcomes. India’s brief copycat attempt was fortuitously terminated in the mid-1970s. Coercive attempts to reduce fertility have been short-lived. Most such ended within forty years. Declining fertility and populations induce a swing to the other extreme of incentivised birthing, as in China and Singapore, because low fertility results in uncompetitive labour costs and a shrinking domestic market — both are damaging for economic growth. The UNFPA good practice asserts that a normative fertility rate is ephemeral, and it must be contextually determined. Plans to achieve the desired fertility rate must never be coercive because such regulations tend to deprive women of their reproductive rights.
“The Real Fertility Crisis” (UNFPA 2025) personalises the fertility transition in India by tracing three generations of an Indian family. A grandmother who lived under patriarchal control in the 1960s, had no awareness of contraception or voice in the timing or number of children she had. Her daughter in the 1990s had some knowledge of contraception methods but little agency to decide the number of children which catered to the preference for a boy child. Her recently- married granddaughter in the 2020s has already decided with her husband, to have two children (slightly below the replacement rate) so that they can give them their best.
This vignette exemplifies why and how India has transitioned demographically even at low per capita income levels — via extensive government outreach, support for public health and medical facilities for pre- and post-natal care, and by an extension of public and private educational facilities for women. This task is incomplete, and results vary significantly across communities and regions. The trend line for gender-sensitive development policy, however, is drawn. It includes reservation for women of one-third of seats in India’s Parliament to increase their representation from the existing 14 per cent — an instance where even UNFPA would support a “forced choice” by legal means.
Together with reaching sustainable fertility rates, India has also reduced poverty. The World Bank assesses that the share of the poor in India declined from 27.1 per cent in 2010-11 to 6.25 per cent in 2022 based on $PPP 3.0 (2021) per day per person poverty line. Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) differs from the market-based currency exchange rate. It estimates the income required for a similar quality of consumption across countries. It neutralises high subsidies and lower labour costs (as in India and most developing countries) which boost the real income of households even if they are lower in dollars at the exchange rate. This is a useful guide for equalising pay for employees across countries, as is necessary for multinationals and the World Bank.
PPP in India quadruples notional nominal income and doubles it in China. But anyone would rather earn the equivalent in dollars than enjoy a higher notional (PPP) value of a lower income in INR or yuan. This is why nationalist economists prefer that countries should develop their own poverty line, relating well-being to minimum income levels in local monetary terms. There is a logic to that. One reason this acquires urgency is that even as per World Bank formulations, the appropriate current poverty line level for India is 2021 PPP$4.20, up from the earlier 2017 PPP$3.65, corresponding to living conditions across lower middle-income countries, like India.
On this basis, poverty in India declined from 57.8 per cent in 2010-11 to 23.89 per cent in 2022. Economist Surjit Bhalla, earlier a member of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, advocates an upward revision in the poverty line.
About 27 per cent of India’s population already benefits now from multiple welfare measures. This incoherence between claimed low poverty levels and much higher subsidy levels is often, erroneously, used to question the earlier reduction in poverty from 16.22 per cent in 2011 to 2.35 per cent in 2022 at the earlier 2017 rate of PPP$2.15 (in 2021 revised to PPP$3.0) applicable for low-income economies.
Formally adopting the PPP$4.2 level prescribed for lower middle-income countries seems appropriate for universal coverage of the poor, even though the resulting poverty levels would increase statistically.
Measuring well-being is far more complicated. The OECD has a “Well-being Framework” to assess social progress. The UNDP’s “Human Development Index” evaluates well-being from life expectancy, education, and income metrics. The World Happiness Report ranks countries on social support, freedom, and corruption metrics. India does not fare well on any of these indices, relative to its achievements in reducing fertility, poverty and boosting economic growth. The 2020 partnership between Well Being for Planet Earth, a Japanese charitable foundation, and Gallup, a US polling specialist, generates survey data from 150,000 respondents annually, on how they view well-being. India could collaborate with Japan to develop globally actionable contextual well-being metrics for evaluating national policies on equity and economic growth — that is, if we can first get around Amartya Sen’s 1970 paradox of the “Paretian Liberal” floundering to optimise economic efficiency with individual liberty.
Source link
[ad_3]
[ad_4]