Sumit Mitra First Published : 26 Feb 2011 12:05:00 AM ISTLast Updated : 26 Feb 2011 01:29:42 AM IST
Is India having a ‘population problem’? While many will agree, some will say that the population scenario, instead of being a spectacle of unrelieved gloom, is actually a cloud with a fairly thick silver lining lying right ahead. It is called the ‘demographic dividend.’ We have to wait a while for an accurate demographic profile to appear from the Census 2011 data, and thus measure this ‘dividend,’ if at all.
However, the intercensal estimates put the 2009 ratio of persons in the 15 to 64 age group, known as the working age population (though not all of them are necessarily working), at 64.3 per cent. In contrast, their ‘dependents’ are 30.8 per cent among the young (0 to 14 years) and 4.9 per cent old.
On this basis, every 100 Indians who are fit to work are now supporting 55.5 who are too young or too old to work. So that is the overall ‘dependency ratio’ of India.
But dependents are not always bad. The young dependents hold out the future promise, as they come of age, to join the workforce and be an earner. India’s young dependency ratio, at 47.09, is a huge number, comprising 32 crore youngsters.
It is this population that constitutes the ‘demographic dividend.’ It supposedly gives us an edge over China, where the young dependency ratio has dropped to 24.4 — nearly a half of India’s — thanks to the one-child norm adopted in Mao Zedong’s China in the 1960s. But there are two reasons why we may not celebrate it yet.
First, India’s young dependency rate is falling very very slowly, to reach 33.2 as late as 2035. So the ‘dividend’ will be too long to mature. Therefore, Indian parents will have to spend a fortune for many years more in bringing up their children. Besides, those who are less likely to produce workers are multiplying much faster than others. This needs to be explained.
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) measures the number of babies a woman is expected to produce in her reproductive years. India has witnessed an admirable, but gradual, drop in TFR, from 3.8 in 1990 to 2.72 in 2009. But TFR is an average with varying figures among different social groups, and even outliers. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are an outlier. They are nearly a quarter of the population but their TFR is as high as 2.89. Since the Hindus as a whole (including SC/ST) have a TFR of just 2, it shows how much the TFR of other castes have shrunk below the replacement level of 1.9, which is the benchmark that a community needs to retain its size in the long term. Therefore an increase in the share of SC/ST in the young population (resulting from higher TFR) may not contribute to demographic dividend because of the educational handicaps they carry historically.
In 2001, India’s overall male literacy was 64.2 per cent more than SC male literacy while women overall were 67.4 per cent more literate than SC women.
It implies that the existing and waiting crops of SC (and even more the ST) youngsters may not qualify themselves for gainful employment when the time comes. With the Muslims (TFR 2.4), the problem is of a different nature as their women are kept more at home, dragging the community’s work participation rate to 31.3 per cent (in 2001) against the Hindus’ 40.4 per cent. One need not sound like a neo-Nazi in saying that India will carry a substantial load of idlers, country yokels and sitters-at-home in 2028, when the number of its people in the working age overtakes that of China. India’s population will still be growing though China’s will stop by 2025. But India will still be short of quality workers.
What is needed is a preferential family planning. But forcible sterilisation is of course a closed chapter following the lessons of the 1975 Emergency. But it is clear that if India wants to reap the benefit of a large working age population, it must go in for not just population management but a highly targeted one at that. It is easier said than done. So easy it is to portray it as ethnic cleansing!
However, an idea which the government may give a try is to link a family’s entitlement under welfare programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREG) scheme and the Public Distribution System (PDS) to two factors: the number of children per couple; and compliance with the Right to Education, meaning that the children are kept enrolled till age 14. This disincentive of welfare withdrawal might not be of much use for the Muslims, who do not quite have an education deficit. But it may spur the dalits and tribals to treat their children as future assets. It is specially so now, as the Unique Identification (UID) card, when fully unrolled, will enable the state to link multiple aspects of the cardholder’s status.
It will still have a political fallout that every party in government will naturally hesitate to accept. Yet it is not a repressive measure like forced sterilisation, and so the political risk may be within reasonable limits. But it is also a fact that in poor households procreation is generally a male imposition. If the women in poor and uneducated homes continue to remain without a voice in a matter so vital to them, there is little hope that fiscal incentives, or even statutory obligations (as under the Right to Education), would be of help. Unwanted babies will keep coming despite the risk of being cut off from the ration list.
There is an interesting solution hinted at by popular authors Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner in their 2009 book, ‘SuperFreakonomics’. It cites a study by two American economists, Emily Oster and Robert Jensen, of the effect of satellite colour television on Indian village women. They studied data from a government survey of 2,700 mostly rural households, and obviously their own survey of villages was not connected to satellite television. As it turned out, “the women who recently got cable TV were significantly less willing to tolerate wife-beating, less likely to admit to having a son preference, and more likely to exercise personal autonomy.” The study of course needs to be expanded across a larger universe.
But, if even partly correct, it offers a huge ‘freakonomic’ upside in terms of women learning to say ‘no’ on the issue of birth. It is a matter of changing habit. In Ireland, TFR was halved in ten years of the government passing a law to end a religious ban on contraceptives.
In the US, it is suspected that the Roe V Wade judgment of the Supreme Court in the 1970s legalising abortion brought down crime rate by lowering sizes of poor families. In India, colour TV may show the way. In that respect, the DMK’s electoral ploy of showering colour TV on Tamil Nadu voters may be good economics too.
onlysumit@gmail.com
Topics:working age population, population management
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