The World Population Prospects 2022, the report prepared by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and released on 11 July, World Population Day this year, had projected that the global population will reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022. Having now crossed the milestone, there is a need to look closer at the trends highlighted in this report, and what it augurs for mankind with over one-fifth of that in India. 

While the report mentioned varying global population trends concerning population growth, total fertility rate and migration patterns, among other aspects, in different regions and countries, the disconcerting aspect of the report was that India was projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. According to various estimates, India’s population is currently assumed to be around 1.412 billion as opposed to China’s figure of 1.426 is likely to reach 1.428 by 1 July 2023 when China’s population at that point might be at a static level owing to its declining or negative population growth rate.

According to the report, China and India, with more than 1.4 billion each, accounted for the two most populous regions in the world, both being in Asia: Eastern and South-Eastern Asia with 2.3 billion people (29 per cent of the global population), and Central and Southern Asia with 2.1 billion (26 per cent). 

Furthermore, more than half of the projected increase in global population will be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania. Stringent population control policies followed by China for the last few decades had resulted in significant population decline and negative growth and are assumed to further keep shrinking in the next many decades. 

That the declining trend of population growth in many parts of the world is being contrasted by an intractable rise in numbers in a handful of nations is enough indication that the effective utilization of global commons and resources for sustainable development goals will continue to face greater stress in coming years. While a consensual distribution of population across regions is not an idea that mankind has ever mulled over, the trends of global migration underlined in this report are enough pointer that mass migration of people from the populous regions to the prosperous regions will provide a balancer of sorts. 

According to the report, the net outflow of migrants exceeded over 1 million for over a decade for around ten countries, largely due to temporary labour movements. Interestingly, it is the South Asian nations – Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka that account for the labour-driven movement of people even as a few nations in West Asia and Latin America accounted for the exodus driven by insecurity and conflict. The trend of blue- and white-collar migration of educated and affluent sections to advanced democracies from the Global South, though, remains under-emphasized. 

What’s in store for India? 

The most populous nation in the world could be a sobriquet that India can no longer wish away. What does it mean to be the home to the largest mass of people in the world, constituting a little over one-fifth of the global population? Well, not much different from how it is today or as it was in the past seven decades or so. 

There will be more stress on public systems that cater to health, education, food distribution system, housing, and water, among others. 

It will mean a far greater number of youth vying for fewer jobs and a far greater number of students competing for fewer seats in higher and professional education where entrance examinations are already distilling out lakhs of aspirants through customized assessment and selection methodologies that are programmed for exclusion rather than inclusion.  

It will imply far greater resources needed for the universalization of primary education, and higher state funding to spruce up public health infrastructure and to enable affordable access to vast sections of the population. It will entail a more formidable industrial base that will provide for sustainable employment, and livelihood opportunities and drive the growth rates to levels that enable equitable development and distribution of wealth and humanitarian means. 

It will also, concomitantly, require much deeper investments in housing and durable habitats to cater to the much higher quantum of rural-to-urban migration that could be expected with the population explosion.  

In other words, the emergence as the world’s most populous nation will not just mean an unquenchable and frenzied race for scarce resources but will also entail the country’s quest for a suitable politico-economic framework that caters to its huge population. 

The quest for the ideal ‘distribution’ framework

For, none of the frameworks experimented by the nation since its birth – be it the early socialist rides, free market dalliances or other neo-liberal ideas that equate ‘reforms’ with privatization and deride the state’s economic role in nation-building – had managed to create and distribute wealth and resources of prosperity in an egalitarian manner leave alone lifting major swathes of the population from relative or absolute poverty and impoverishment.  

As a heavily populous nation since the outset, India’s nation-building project has very much  been about ‘welfare’ goals - namely eradicating poverty, creating a dependable public health  system, heralding an economy that will provide employment to all, and enabling universal education, which co-existed with the larger goals of institution building that involved raising many “temples of modern India.” 

While these are indeed developmental goals of any newly-independent third-world nation, the Indian endeavour, like the Chinese experience, was also about establishing an egalitarian politico-economic system supposed to derive essential benefits that are distributed evenly to the population. Though these two most populous nations realized this is not possible without halting the forward march of the population numbers, both ended up seeking diametrically opposite routes towards this goal even while pursuing almost similar routes of generating prosperity for their people.  

If China’s rigid population control policies have brought initial gains and significant population control, they also, over the years, led to an ever-increasing geriatric population and a commensurate depletion of its workforce after an enterprising human resource constituency drove its economic rise for a few decades. In contrast, the Indian experience of non-dogmatic and socially-driven demographic readaptation meant the emergence of the world’s largest pool of a young population whose potential needed to be exploited. 

The  expected dividend of the world’s largest youth population, however, did not sufficiently accrue as the resultant economic growth did not burgeon towards the projected boom of industrial production and manufacturing revolutions that were expected from India’s integration with the global economy. A market-driven economic process facilitated many scattered zones of prosperity which though were eclipsed by instability, inequality and conflict over resources. 

Effective utilisation of the workforce, despite being a trained and educated legion, might not have happened on projected lines probably owing to their scattered presence across the country and the inability of decades of governance systems to distribute opportunities to all nooks of the country. Ill-conceived attempts to consolidate them aggravated rural-to-urban migration and placed further pressure on urban centres and cities already brimming to capacity and creating a list overcrowded and polluted conclaves with daily sagas of survival. 

The economic slowdown of the last many years followed by the pandemic drastically vitiated the systemic fault lines and structural deficits that have haunted the fundamental politico-economic structures of the nation since its formation. In other words, balancing the imperatives of a welfare state with drivers of exponential economic and industrial surges was no longer an easy task for any ideological or political pathway. 

If this remains the recurrent condition, how then will India gear up to the challenges of being the most populous nation?  

The journey to the top

Like its hugely populous neighbour, India too had since its emergence as a newly independent nation-state attempted various population control policies involving multiple strategies that included family planning programmes, birth control initiatives, contraception campaigns as well as a sterilization project that became controversial over its forced enforcement methods. 

The National Family Planning Programme of 1952 envisaged the need to slow the population growth rate and aimed at cutting fertility rates as one of its key objectives. Being linked to the five-year plans, which was then the core framework for nation-building and economic development, the Programme saw novel birth control campaigns that appealed to newly-weds to seek counsel from Family Welfare Centres and exhorted them to “Stop after two or three kids.” 

In the subsequent decades, this slogan was reworded to “hum do, hamare do” – implying “we two, our two,” thus clearly invoking the thinking that the ideal Indian family should be having only two kids. This slogan, in fact, defined the national population policy for the decades to come to the extent that the two-child norm is considered the ideal size even in contemporary times. 

As of today, only a handful of state governments are known to be rigorously following the two-child norm, with some reportedly tying up social welfare benefits with adherence to the norm.   

Yet, the focus on population policies seems to have slipped somewhere down the line. The country’s integration with the global trading systems following liberalization of the economy, the resultant growth in incomes and wealth, and the emergence of the world’s largest and most educated middle class came together as factors that forced a revisiting of traditional societal concepts about families and their composition. 

As patriarchy-centred joint families gave way or disintegrated into what was described as ‘nuclear’ families, the post-liberalisation era also witnessed more women entering the workforce and professional spheres of the economy which also translated into micro- and also child-less families.   

Why then has India, after over seven decades of family planning and three decades of economic liberalization, still emerged as the world’s most populous nation?  

The Indian government’s family planning programme highlights 3 factors that influence population growth and adds to population momentum in the country: 

(a) Unmet need of family planning – wherein married women wish to stop childbearing or delay the next child for a few years but do not use contraceptive methods;

(b) Age at marriage and first childbirth – wherein the country has over 23.3 of girls getting married below the age of 19 years and out of the total deliveries, 6.8 per cent are of teenagers in the 15-19 age group. 

(c) Spacing between births – wherein the need to maintain a healthy space of 3 years between two childbirths is not effectively practiced in the country. 

Such birds-eye prognosis apart, there are fundamental socio-economic and cultural elements that continue to drive and influence family planning perceptions in the country. 

Despite the notable social changes driven by the modernist ideas of small families, acceptance of more individualistic spaces within the family systems that discourage child-raising responsibilities as well as revisionist models like ‘live-in’ relationships, the fundamental cultural constructs governing the Indian family system largely prevail. 

Essentially a pro-natalist system, the concept of the Indian family relies on the primacy of child-bearing without which the essential identity and structure of the ‘family’ is seen as incomplete, diminished and undermined in the Indian cultural constructs. It is, hence, not surprising that childless and younger couples face social pressure and stigma as a daily phenomenon. 

Beyond medical reasons or other misfortunes, the element of ‘choice’, when it comes to child bearing, is almost, if not absolutely, non-existent in the Indian cultural conceptions of family. The contention, like in Western societies, that couples have a choice to decide against child-centric conjugality only stands to be misinterpreted in the Indian system.  

It is, hence, not surprising to note that even the government programme for family planning, while running campaigns for reproductive health and birth spacing, does not suggest the scope for a childless family system nor promotes a larger meaning to life that individuals can have even without an immediate family of their own.  

Time for a scientific population control policy

Notwithstanding the glorious tradition of the country’s family planning programme, the urgency for a new and scientific population ‘control’ policy needs no emphasis. The usage of ‘control’, notwithstanding its numerous and conceivable manifestations, signifies the urgency for drafting, debating and implementing a national policy on a war footing. This, though, has to be done without missing the wood for the trees owing to the numerous minefields that could be set off with a badly framed policy.

The policy has to be universal and unbiased: The mere suggestion of population control could raise eyebrows, and even alarm in some quarters, owing to the politicization of debates surrounding population growth and the blame game targeting some communities. 

While some communities have customarily preferred larger families irrespective of their economic wherewithal, it is also a matter of concern that competitive politics has prompted many sections to egg on their community members to increase numbers to mobilize along sectarian lines and seek gains through communal bargaining.    

Such patterns augur ominous signs for the nation as rapid and uncontrollable population growth is not in the national interest by any connotation. Certainly so, the new policy should be both universal and inclusive and should have elements of awareness, education and enlightenment as done in the initial years of the family planning programmes. 

Not as a strong-arm state policy: India has had a dreaded episode of population control when the government in the 1970s pursued an over-zealous and coercive sterilization policy, particularly targeting the lower strata of the society, which endowed a controversial and draconian character to the whole campaign. 

However, the Indian experience of the 1970s came nowhere near the level of state violence and invasive enforcement that China pursued in its aggressive pursuit of a one-child policy since the 1980s. The Chinese experience was known to be highly heavy-handed and involved rampant state atrocities, including forced abortions and punishments, with the resultant scars of such hardcore policy implementation said to be still echoing in Chinese society. 

After more than three decades of stringent implementation, China initially relaxed and then reversed this policy by 2016 having realized the reversal of birth rates (with the total fertility rate brought down to 1.3 per woman) but also accumulating a colossal ageing population and a resultant depleting workforce, which once drove its economic rise. 

Even then China pursued an incremental and phased reversal of the one-child policy with a partial relaxation announced in November 2013 that allowed couples to have two children if one parent is a single child. Following a lukewarm response from the population, Beijing further relaxed the policy and allowed a two-child policy in October 2015. 

The Chinese government was forced to go further by allowing a three-child norm in May 2021 and also allowing the population to have the first two children without having to inform the government. However, the key to these reversals, or rather reforms, was said to be the realization in the Chinese government that the state should not intervene in the reproductive decisions of the populace. While China can boast a negative population growth for decades to come, its socio-economic implications may not be much to its satisfaction. 

Hum do hamare ek 

The takeaway from the Chinese experience is that it may not be ideal for the government to aggressively control the reproductive character of a society. Yet, the need to implement sound, robust and equitable policies for population control needs no overstatement in the light of the global population surge and could, invariably, provide fruitful results. 

Accordingly, the time is now ripe for India to launch a new family planning campaign that could include: 

(a) A national population policy that encourages a single-child norm for all Indian families;

(b) Encourages and rewards a single-child family with incentives for education, employment and social welfare schemes.

(c) Maintain the existing system that effectively prohibits and mitigates all forms of sex determination tests, and strengthen it towards greater stringency with punitive measures so as to ensure that the single-child norm does not lead to gender preferences.  

(d) Expand the reach and intensity of reproductive health education, and qualitatively augment the curriculum and character of sex education and pedagogy in the school education system.

(e) Establish an eco-system that encourages child-less families with incentives for couples to adopt orphaned and homeless babies by transforming the current system of adoption as an exercise of governmental, NGOs and social service agencies.  

(f) Establish a National Happiness Ministry that enables citizens to review and revisit the purposes of life, provides new meaning to well-being and human existence, and encourages a thought process that favours child-less families and adoption.  

While many of these proposals may sound like wishful thinking and could easily be dismissed as unfeasible, the societal and economic implications of being the most populous nation need hardly any more reminders.  

By 1965-66, a decade after the national population policies were formulated, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in India was 5.7. A few more decades later, it was brought down to 2.4 by 2012. Eight years later, it stood at 2.0 in 2020 whereas the UN report forecasts the Indian TFR at around 1.29 only around 2100. China, on the contrary, had already brought it down to 1.23 after three decades of the one-child policy.  

While this could be an indicator that a one-child policy, even without following the Chinese draconian model, can still make a difference to the Indian scenario, the opportunity for India is to pursue a more humanistic policy that aims not just at birth control but a holistic transformation in the approaches of the citizens towards meanings of life and related conceptions about mankind and wellbeing. 

A national policy is also significant for the fact that uneven distribution and density of populations and imbalanced as well as a scattered economic and industrial architecture in the country means that states will opt for stand-alone policies which may not necessarily complement the national mission. 

For example, while many urbanized, educated and progressive societies across the country have adopted a one-child norm without a nudge from their respective state governments, some states like Uttar Pradesh, despite being the most populous, are still struggling to effectively implement a two-child norm even as some other large states like Rajasthan are mulling the scope for a one-child rule. 

Such diversity, though, may not suit a national policy which has to seek population control in mission mode to ensure that the July 2023 milestone is awakening and an opportunity to frame a scientific and effective depopulation strategy. 

As one of the fastest growing economies, but still struggling with sustainable developmental goals, India could emerge a stronger nation if it puts a brake on the forward march of the population in terms of numbers, and instead enables its forward journey as a nation that will facilitate all-around prosperity and welfare of its people.