Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

Often, to understand the events of a period, one has to be given context: what was the value system of the day? What was taken as obviously true? Or the “right” thing to be doing? That’s obvious; but it came as a shock to me to see that it can be true even when analyzing seemingly recent events. Like the infamous sterilization drive of Sanjay Gandhi & Co. In his book Imagining India , former Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani says that as recently as the mid-twentieth century, even the West was fearful of the Malthusian population bomb, namely that population would grow much faster than food supply. India and China were watched with the utmost fear on this front. In that age, sterilization of the unfit and termination of “defective” babies were considered reasonable even in the West. Is it really a surprise then that both Sanjay Gandhi in India and the Chinese government enforced population control? Hell, as recently as 1983, Indira Gandhi and China’s family planning minister recei...

Remember those terms from statistics classes back at school? Like mean, mode, median and other terms which all looked similar, but apparently were not the same? And how none of them, apart from average, ever seemed to get used anywhere in real life? Well, that was my experience anyway. And so I was amused to see a chart (well OK, bar-graph, since we are reliving statistics terms) that used the term “median”. As most of us don’t know, the median is the number above which half the entries lie (and hence, below which the other half lies). The chart confirms what most of us knew already: India is a young country governed by people on their deathbeds. What’s new info is that so are most other countries, though the age gap between the rulers and the ruled isn’t as much in the others.