India’s rising population poses questions on stability

Posted on August 24, 2009
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In the 62 years since independence, the population has tripled to 1.2 billion. In the next 20 years, India is expected to surpass neighboring China as the world’s most populous nation.

“When I first went to India there was a joke that India had only two sports — cricket and the other was private,” says Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Brookings Institution.

Somewhat surprisingly, India’s fertility rate of 3.1 births per woman is not that much higher than the world average. That’s largely because of the huge migration in recent years from rural areas to Mumbai and other major cities, with their greater opportunities for employment.

“There’s a direct relationship historically between income and decrease in population,” Cohen notes, “and what’s happened is that in Indian cites, especially the prosperous ones, growth has leveled off.”

Not all Indians consider their vast numbers a liability. Many argue that because the population is young — the median age is 25 compared with 36 in the United States and 43 in Japan — the government doesn’t have to maintain a costly social support system for the elderly. And a youthful work force will lead to a high rate of economic growth in the future, or so the theory goes.

“But that depends entirely — and this is where the story gets more important and complicated — on whether they can educate that population,” Cohen says. “An illiterate population is a ticking time bomb.”

India has a global reputation as a high-tech center, but only 66 percent of adults can read and write. It was not until this month that the country’s Parliament finally passed a bill guaranteeing free and compulsory education for all children between 6 and 14.

Despite the challenge of educating so many kids, Indians are adverse to anything that smacks of government-imposed birth control. Like China, with its notorious one-child policy, India had a draconian experience with family planning in the ’70s.

“My own cook was sterilized twice,” Cohen says. “The sterilization procedures were forceful — they would grab guys off the street and tie them off. Teachers had to have quotas of young men. That gave family planning a bad flavor.”

As happened in Japan, though, Indians are beginning to realize that voluntary birth control is a key to escaping poverty. “They figure out that if you want to educate your kids properly you want to have fewer of them,” Cohen says.

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