India's Population Growth Rate

Is India’s population still growing? Or does the answer vary drastically across its states? This blog is not about the political (and therefore emotional) connection of those questions to the topic of delimitation. Instead, it is about the at-times surprising answers to the questions, without the political and moralising aspects.

 

Rukmini S’s post presents the data on this superbly. Even without China or Sanjay Gandhi-like birth control measures, the following has happened.

“There was certainly a time when India's population was growing very fast. In the three decades after Independence, India's population had doubled. But from the 1980s, population growth began to slow down.”

Today, India’s population growth rate is below the global average!

 

Unintuitively, all states are slowing, though they slow at different rates:

“Until the 1970s, population growth rates in different states were quite similar. However, since the 1980s, India's southern states have been growing far slower than the central, northern and eastern states.”

TFR (Total Fertility Rate) refers to the number of children a woman has. A TFR of 2.1 is the “replacement fertility”, i.e., the value at which a population neither grows nor falls. India’s TFR is now just below TFR.

While the TFR may be below replacement rate already, the total population won’t reduce any time soon. Why not? Because the population reduces only when the number of people who die in a year exceeds the numbers born. Since India is still a young country, the death rate is (and will remain) low for decades to come. All of which is why India’s population, as per UN projections, will keep growing till the mid-2060’s (reaching a peak of 1.7 billion).

 

A consequence of the different rates of slowdown across different states is that the ratio of old to young people varies across regions.

An ageing south in turn has multiple consequences, as Rohan Venkat wrote:

“This idea of an ageing South India has a number of implications – cultural (not least in the large number of North Indian workers moving South), societal (is Indian society prepared to deal with a larger elderly population?), governmental (can healthcare systems keep up?), among others.”