Why India's population will stabilise sooner than expected

World Population Day was observed on July 11 and for a brief moment the world remembered an old problem. Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad gave a speech on the need to control population growth and suggested measures to increase the age of marriage. We have been trying to stabilise our population since the early seventies with efforts that have ranged from gentle persuasion to Sanjay Gandhi’s infamous sterilisation campaign. What has come of these decades of effort? How serious is India’s population problem?

India’s population is now almost 1.2 billion and is closing in on China’s 1.33 billion. It is expected that around 2028, India will bypass China to become the world’s most populous nation. Till recently this large and growing population was considered an unmitigated problem. More recently, we have come to see the advantages of a large internal market and of the “demographic dividend” of changing age-structures. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that India’s population will unrelentingly grow for the foreseeable future. We need to revisit this assumption.

The country’s population growth rate has been steadily drifting down from a peak of 2.3 per cent in the late seventies. Although we will have to wait a couple of years for a full-blown census, the current growth rate is estimated at 1.5 per cent per year. This is still a very high level compared to China’s 0.6 per cent, Western Europe’s 0.2 per cent and Japan’s minus 0.1 per cent. India’s demographic expansion is expected to slow over the next decades but most conventional estimates suggest that the population will not have stabilised even in 2050. For instance, the UN’s Population Division estimates that India’s population will be growing at 0.25 per cent per year even in 2050. In my view, these estimates do not fully reflect three powerful dynamics that are emerging.

Falling fertility rates
A key factor that determines population growth is the average number of children being born per woman (this is called the fertility rate). A stable population requires a fertility rate of around 2.1 in developed countries and 2.3 in developing countries after allowing for differences in mortality. This ratio has declined very sharply world-wide in recent decades. The fertility rates of many European countries are already well below the replacement rate — Italy (1.4), Germany (1.3), Russia (1.4), the UK (1.8). Asian countries too have seen sharp drops with Japan’s fertility rate at 1.3 and China’s at 1.8. In other words, these populations are no longer replacing themselves.

As recently as the early seventies, the average Indian woman gave birth to 5.3 babies. According to the National Family Health Survey 2007, the fertility rate is now down to 2.7. Indeed, the ratio is already below the replacement rate in southern India (Tamil Nadu is at 1.8). The fertility rates for Bihar and UP are still high at 4 and 3.8, respectively but they too are declining. Improved female literacy, higher marriage age and wider use of contraceptives have caused this decline. By most indications, these factors will cause the fertility rate to decline further from here.

Missing women
India has long had a skewed gender ratio because of deep seated socio-cultural prejudices against women. According to the 2001 census, there are 933 women for every 1,000 men. The skew is especially wide in the north-western states. The worst affected are Punjab and Haryana which respectively have only 874 and 861 women per 1,000 men. Since it is women who produce babies, the gender imbalance effectively lowers the reproductive capacity of the overall population. This factor may not have mattered much when the average women produced over five children, but it matters now. Adjusted for this gender imbalance, the country’s effective fertility rate is already running at 2.5 which is barely higher than the replacement rate. Note that the same factor is also true of China. .

Urbanisation
It should come as no surprise that fertility rates in urban areas are lower than in rural areas, but most people may not realise that the existing urban population is no longer replacing itself! According to the National Family Health Survey 2007, urban fertility rate is at 2.1 which is already below the replacement level for a developing country like India. While data is not specifically available for the urban upper-middle class, it is likely that its fertility rate is now falling to Western European levels (readers need not take my word for this — they need only to look around themselves).

Urbanisation has been a major factor that caused population growth to decline in other countries. In India, it has not yet been a major factor because India so far has been reluctant to urbanise. Around 70 per cent of the population still lives in rural areas. However, this is about to change due to accelerated economic growth. It is likely that India will be an urban majority country by 2040. Even if there was no further change in urban and rural fertility rates, the change in urban-rural mix would itself bring down the overall fertility rate for the country.

When will India’s population stabilise?
Given the above factors, it appears that India may at last be turning the corner on its population problem. So, will India’s population stabilise soon? Not yet — because Indians are also beginning to live longer. Life expectancy has risen in the last two decades from 58 years to around 64 years. We can reasonably expect this to rise by another 15 years by the middle of the century. Note that rising life expectancy is the main factor driving population growth in countries like China where fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels. However, from a reproductive perspective, this is an “optical illusion”. Unless we discover the elixir of immortality, population growth from longevity will eventually unwind itself. China’s population, for instance, will begin to decline from 2030.

My rough back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that India’s population will stabilise around 2040-45 at about 1.48 billion. This may seem very far away but in demographic terms it is very close. Indeed, my estimates suggest that the country’s population will stabilise two decades and 140 million short of most conventional projections. By 2050-55, the population will slowly begin to shrink. This is no mean change in trajectory. One thing, however, will not change. The above factors apply equally to China. Therefore, India will still bypass China in around 2028.