Demographic dividend or population bomb? Only time will tell

Forty years ago, western scholars told us that the root cause of most of India’s problems such as poverty, unemployment, illiteracy was its huge population. To control population growth Sanjay Gandhi launched a forcible sterilisation programme that became so unpopular that the Congress was routed in the 1977 general elections. Now in the last few years, we have been hearing from the same sources that our country’s greatest asset is our huge and young population. And let us not forget that in the intervening period our population has more than doubled. Why then a large population, that was once viewed as the biggest threat to our existence, is now being perceived as the biggest opportunity now? In fact, it is a double edged sword. 

It took a hundred thousand years for humans to reach their 1 billion mark in the year 1800. But the last one billion to our global population was added in just 12 years’ time (from 1999 to 2011 global population increased from six billion to seven billion). For much of the history our population was controlled by famines and epidemics. With rapid advances in science and technology, we could control these natural forces, and it led to great surge in our numbers in the last 200 years.

Currently, populations of most of the developed countries of Western Europe and North America have either stabilised or are declining. All the future growth projections are coming from Asia and Africa. What is going to matter more is the quality of a country’s population rather than its size. We have a shining example of Japan before us. In fact we need not look far; in our own country itself states that score high on literacy, especially female literacy, have low fertility rates and stand higher on most indices of human development. States that lag behind are from the cow belt — such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Media projects us as a young country with the average age of our citizens at just 26 years. This implies that millions of young people are entering the workforce each year seeking productive employment. Large numbers of these young people have virtually no skills or skills that have no use in industries/ businesses. In such a scenario, how can these people be employed? Besides, even today, 60% of the population is employed in farming, contributing to just 13% to our GDP. In most cases, the entire family works on a small patch of land because of lack of employment opportunities. 

Unless we are able to create lakhs of jobs each year, it would not take long for this demographic dividend to turn into a demographic bomb. Our inability to provide productive employment to our young people can lead to serious social unrest. For generating employment, it is imperative to strengthen our manufacturing sector. In the World Bank ranking of nations for ‘ease of doing business’ we stand at lowly 134 position — even lower than Pakistan and Bangladesh. We need to dismantle our archaic bureaucracy, reform tax regime, build infrastructure, and invest in education and health care. For all this to happen, we need a massive dose of economic reforms. We have a huge responsibility; we cannot afford to fail if we want to secure the future for our coming generations.

The author is a teacher and corporate trainer