India faces deepening demographic divide as it prepares to overtake China as the world’s most populous country
India is poised to become the world’s most populous country Composite: Guardian Design/ AFP/Getty Images
India’s entrenched north-south divide is growing as its population changes, with serious social and political consequences
The cry of a baby born in India
one day next year will herald a watershed moment for the country, when
the scales tip and India overtakes China as the world’s most populous
nation.
Yet the story of India’s population
boom is really two stories. In the north, led by just two states, the
population is still rising. In the richer south, numbers are stabilising
and in some areas declining. The deepening divisions between these
regions mean the government must eventually grapple with a unique
problem: the consequences of a baby boom and an ageing population, all
inside one nation.
India
is currently home to more than 1.39 billion people – four times that of
the US and more than 20 times the UK – while 1.41bn live in China. But
with 86,000 babies born in India every day, and 49,400 in China, India
is on course to take the lead in 2023 and hit 1.65 billion people by
2060.
On
15 November the world’s population will reach a total of 8 billion
people. Between now and 2050, over half of the projected increase in the
global population will happen in just eight countries: the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the
Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania – and India.
The
growth will place huge pressure on India’s resources, economic
stability and society, and the repercussions will reach far beyond its
borders. As a country on the forefront of the climate crisis, already
grappling with extreme weather events 80% of the year, diminishing
resources such as water could become decisive factors in what India’s
future population looks like.
One country, two stories
Fears
of “population explosion” in India – where development caves in beneath
the weight of an uncontrollably expanding population and the country’s
resources are overrun, leaving millions to starve – have abounded for
over a century.
Post independence, India’s
population grew at a significant pace; between 1947 and 1997, it went
from 350 million to 1 billion. But since the 1980s, various initiatives
worked to convince families, particularly those from poorer and
marginalised backgrounds who tend to have the most children, of the
benefits of family planning. As a result, India’s fertility rate began
to fall faster than any of the doomsday “explosion” scenarios had
predicted.
A small family is now the norm in
India, and with the annual population growth rate less than 1%, fears of
population-driven collapse are no longer seen as realistic. In the
1950s, a woman in India would give birth to an average of over six
children; today the national average is just over two and still
continuing to fall.
Nonetheless, the curbs on
population growth have not been uniform across India, and India’s
entrenched north-south divide has played out significantly in
demographics, with ongoing social and political consequences.
For
the next decade, one-third of India’s population increase will come
from just two northern states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Bihar, the only
state in India where women still typically have more than three
children, is not expected to hit population stability – 2.1 children per
woman – until 2039. Kerala, India’s most educated, progressive state,
hit that figure in 1998.
In
Bihar’s poverty stricken area of Kishanganj, which has one of the
highest rates of fertility in India, women said they had only recently
begun to learn about the benefits of a having fewer children.
The
urge to have sons, who in parts of India are still considered much more
desirable than daughters, remained a key motivator for women in the
village. Surta Devi, 36, said she had six children in order to make sure
she had two sons to “carry on our lineage”.
“It was only after I gave birth to all my children that doctors told me about family planning,” said Devi.
Phullo
Devi, 55, an illiterate labourer who had six children before she opted
for sterilisation, said she wished she had done things differently. “If I
had less children, I would have been able to raise them better and been
able to educate them,” she said.
But
Devi said things were slowly changing in the village. “Now health
workers campaign house-to-house and make people aware about
contraception and condoms. I absolutely want my sons and daughters to
have less children so they don’t have to live in poverty,” she said.
A bus for migrant workers stops to pick up passengers in Noida, south-east of New Delhi. Photograph: Harish Tyagi/EPA
The ‘youth bulge’
A
particular demographic challenge, widespread across India but
particularly concentrated in poorer northern states, is that of the “youth
bulge”. The median age of an Indian is 29 and the country is grappling
with a vast, ambitious and increasingly restless young population, the
majority of whom are unskilled, and for whom there are not enough
schools, universities, training programmes and most of all, not enough
jobs. Across India, youth unemployment is 23% and only one in four
graduates are employed. While female literacy is growing, only 25% of women in India participate in the workforce.
In
Uttar Pradesh, where the median age is 20, there are over 3.4 million
unemployed young people. Earlier this year, riots broke out in Bihar
after more than twelve million people applied for 35,000 positions in
the Indian Railways.
Vishu Yadav, 25, from
Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh, has a masters degree, an education
diploma and passed a teacher eligibility test, but is unemployed, with
teaching jobs scarce and over a million people now applying for officer
positions in the state civil service. “It’s a depressing, hopeless
situation. I am eligible to become a teacher but I can not secure a
position. There are too many young people with qualifications and not
enough jobs,” he said.
Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of Population Foundation India, said there was still time for this young population to work to India’s benefit.
“India
has a fantastic window of opportunity but it will only be there for
approximately the next two decades,” said Muttreja. “We have the
capacity to tap into the potential of the youth population but we need
to invest in adolescent education, health and sexual health right away
if we want to reap the benefits.
“Otherwise, our demographic dividend could turn into a demographic disaster.”
Muttreja
said India’s youth risk fuelling population growth unless contraception
and family planning services are improved, describing the situation as
“woefully inadequate”.
Female sterilisation is
still the most widely used contraceptive method in India, and that’s
mostly by older married women. Of India’s tiny health budget, only 6% is
put aside for family planning, and just 0.4% of that is invested in
temporary methods such as the contraceptive pill or condoms.
“Currently
we have almost 360 million young people, the majority of whom are at a
reproductive age, and that number is only going to increase over the
next few decades,” Muttreja said.
“The need for more temporary contraception methods is urgent. It will be very problematic if this need is not met.”
According
to the UN, there are 10 million unwanted pregnancies in India every
year. Abortion is legal in India, but was only legalised for single
women this year. It remains taboo for married women and most abortions
are carried out by village “quacks”, often with long-term health
consequences.
Yet for several states in the
south which now have falling populations, another challenge lingers on
the horizon, one which is rarely mentioned. In the next 15 years, the
average man from the southern state of Tamil Nadu will be 12 years older
than someone from Bihar.
Residents of Tamil Nadu will be on average 12 years older than those from Bihar, in the next 15 years Photograph: Idrees Mohammed/EPA
“The
crisis that the south will soon be facing is that of an ageing
population,” said Aparajita Chattopadhyay, a professor at the
International Institute for Population Sciences.
“India
will soon have over 10% of the population who are ageing, which in our
context is a huge number. That presents significant problems in terms of
employment, in terms of social security but most of all for healthcare,
where spending is still very low and the prevalence of diseases such as
diabetes is very high among older people. This should not be ignored.”
A political problem
The
north-south divide has also enabled the politicisation of population in
India. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by a hardline
figure from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the high
population has been used to justify the drafting of a population
control bill, proposing coercive methods to ensure two children per
couple.
The draft bill is seen by some as a
thinly veiled attack on Muslims, fuelled by a pervasive yet inaccurate
myth promoted by Hindu nationalists that the number of Muslims is fast
outpacing Hindus, as part of a conspiracy by Muslims to become the
majority in India. Muslims make up 14% of the population, Hindus are
80%.
“All this talk of population control
measures in Uttar Pradesh is only to keep the controversy going and to
give Muslims a bad name, stir up hatred and win the Hindu majority
vote,” said SY Quraishi, a former Indian civil servant who recently
published The Population Myth, a book demolishing the myths around Islam
and family planning in India.
“As the data clearly shows, this suggestion of Muslims overtaking the Hindu population is a blatant lie.”
Quraishi
emphasised that while Muslims in India do have higher fertility rates
than Hindus, this is not due to religion but because Muslims are often
poorer, less educated and with less access to health services. The
Muslim fertility rate in India is also now falling faster than the Hindu
rate.
BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay recently
submitted a petition to the supreme court calling for “an effective
population control policy like China” to cope with the “population
explosion”, though such policies have been rebuffed by the central BJP
government.
Quraishi said rather than trying to
emulate China’s population control measures, policymakers in Delhi
should take them as a warning.
“In India people
used to admire China’s policy of one child norm,” he said. “But now
look, China has a population crisis on their hands, 70% of their
population are ageing. That should be an important lesson for anyone
talking about coercive measures: otherwise in a few decades that could
be us too.”
Cities under pressure
Though
fears of an Indian “population bomb” have eased, one area already
creaks under the strain of a rising population. India’s cities are some
of the biggest and overburdened in the world, and in the next few
decades they will get even bigger.
India is
still largely rural, with about 33% of the population living in cities,
but urbanisation is picking up pace. By 2035, 675 million Indians will
live in cities and, according to UN projections, by 2050, more Indians
will live in urban environments than villages. With a population of 20
million, India’s capital Delhi is already one of the largest and most
polluted cities in the world. It’s expected to grow to 28 million by
2041, according to the city masterplan.
India’s capital, Delhi, is expected to grow to 28 million people by 2041. Photograph: Kabir Jhangiani/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
In
the biggest metropolises of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata,
housing, water, transport and sanitation infrastructure are already
struggling to cope, and this will only be exacerbated by climate change.
In India’s financial capital Mumbai, which is predicted to grow from 20
million to 27 million by 2025, 40% of people live in slums. In 2019,
the city of Chennai ran out of water entirely.
“Urbanisation
will drive important changes in this country in the coming decades but
at the same time, the quality of life in Indian cities is already
deteriorating fast,” said Rumi Aijaz, a fellow at the Delhi thinktank
Observer Research Foundation.
“Adaptation of
urban areas is one of the biggest challenges India faces as its
population grows – but right now the government response is weak.”
What happens next
Despite
the continued rise in population in the north over the next few years,
India’s overall trajectory is one of declining fertility and eventual
population stability. Yet just how far fertility will fall is still up
for debate. Unlike in the west, India’s declining fertility rate so far
has not coincided with a change in family structure or marriage
patterns, such as women choosing to marry and have children later, or
not at all.
Instead, so far, the maternal
expectations of Indian women have remained largely unchanged; the
majority still get married by their early twenties, have two children
while relatively young and then stop, often by opting for sterilisation.
As
India develops and more women are educated and enter the workforce,
experts say fertility norms will continue to shift. Back in the Bihar
village of Kishanganj, Nazia Parveen, 19, who is studying at university,
said she had already noticed the difference that women’s education had
made to the number of children being born locally.
“Now
much fewer children are being born in the village and around 60% of the
families are using family planning,” she said. “This is such a change
from the past when there was no awareness, and it is all because of
women’s education. No one of my generation wants to have more than two
children.”
Mohammad Sartaj Alam contributed reporting from Bihar