The full picture of India’s population growth story

The theory of India’s so-called population explosion is not supported by data and evidence.

On July 11, the United Nations’ Population Division released the 2022 edition of its World Population Prospects report, which stated that India is likely to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. The report made headlines across the media, with several television channels holding debates on the issue. Many characterised the report as evidence that India’s population is exploding and could only be controlled through a stringent law. Some tried to blame the Muslim community for driving the numbers, and some political leaders demanded a population control law.

Adequate measures must be taken to capitalise on our large young population through investments in education, health, and creating economic opportunities. 

Unfortunately, none of these misconceptions are new. Time and again, the discourse around coercive population policies has gained momentum with widespread misinformation around the growth of the Muslim population.

The theory of India’s so-called population explosion is not supported by data and evidence. India has witnessed a significant decline in its population growth rate in the last 50 years. In 1972, our annual population growth rate stood at 2.3%. It has now dropped to less than 1%. Over the same period, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman during her reproductive years — has decreased from about 5.4 to less than 2.1. In other words, the country has attained replacement fertility rate, defined as the fertility rate at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next.

Despite the decline in growth rate and TFR, India’s population will continue to grow in absolute numbers for some time, owing to the high proportion of young people in the population. Currently, every fifth person in India is an adolescent (aged between 10 and 19) and every third a young person (aged between 10 and 24). Even if these young couples produce only one or two children, it will still result in a quantum increase in population size. However, the numbers will stabilise as the population ages.

According to a 2020 study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, Seattle, published in The Lancet, India is expected to reach its peak population of 1.6 billion by 2048. India is also projected to have a continued steep decline in TFR, which will drop to 1.3 in 2100, when our population would be about 1.1 billion. So, the notion that India’s population will continue to grow exponentially and indefinitely is untrue.

The slowdown in population growth has been witnessed across communities, and contrary to common perception, there’s no threat of the Muslim population growing faster and overtaking the Hindus. In fact, the fertility gap between Hindus and Muslims is narrowing. According to data from the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (2019-21), the TFR among Muslims has seen the sharpest decline among all religious communities over the past two decades. The fertility rate among Muslims has dropped to 2.3 during the 2019-2021 period, while in 1992-93, Muslims had a fertility rate of 4.4. Among Hindus, the fertility rate has dropped from 3.3 in 1992-93 to 1.94 in the latest survey. There is a direct correlation between TFR and development indicators such as literacy levels of women, employment, income, and access to health services. For instance, the TFR of Muslims in Tamil Nadu stands at 1.93, while for Hindus in Bihar, it stands at 2.88. The fertility differentials among religious groups in India are due to the differences in the stages of demographic transition that these communities are in, and in the level of education, health, nutrition, employment, and development opportunities available to them.

Stringent population-control measures have historically had many harmful consequences — such as sex selective practices in places with widespread son preference, a phenomenon prevalent in India. China had to eventually abandon its one-child policy after finding itself in the midst of a population crisis and an abnormally high male-to-female sex ratio. During the Emergency era, a widespread mass vasectomy programme by the Indira Gandhi-led government was the cause of gross violation of civil liberties.

In the 1977 general elections, these sterilisations became a major issue, and Indira Gandhi was voted out, resulting in the formation of India’s first non-Congress government at the Centre. During the Emergency, we saw a popular rejection of a coercive population control policy. India should continue focusing on a rights-based approach to family planning, which it committed to, along with 178 other governments, at the International Conference on Population Development in 1994.

According to NFHS-5, approximately 22 million Indian women have an unmet need for family planning, which means that while they may want to stop or delay childbearing, they are unable to do so due to the various barriers they face in accessing contraception. Going forward, our focus should be on providing women of all communities access to family planning services, comprehensive sex education to adolescents, and changing regressive social norms that compromise the reproductive autonomy of women.

Adequate measures must be taken to capitalise on our large young population through investments in education, health, and creating economic opportunities for young people, which would help us harness what economists call the demographic dividend. Population is not simply about numbers, it is about the people.

Poonam Muttreja is executive director, Population Foundation of India

The views expressed are personal