CHAPTER 6

Manpower: Demographic Profile

India is one of the most populous countries of the world, occupying second place after China and accounting for 16.7 percent of the world population, but having only 2.42 percent of the total world area (32,87,590 km²). Population constitutes the human resources of a country, which is vital for economic growth. To have a basic understanding of the population problem of a country, one should have complete knowledge of the basic features of the population of that country. The demographic features provide knowledge about the density of population, age composition, sex composition, literacy rate, life expectancy, rural–urban ratio, diversity, growth and quality of population, and so on. The study of demographic features assumes significance because the forces of demographic transition have a direct bearing on the direction and pace of the process of development. The present chapter discusses all these aspects in brief.

The 2011 census was the 15 nationwide census carried out in India. The first was held in 1881, although it was not able to cover all of British-held Indian Territory. The first comprehensive nationwide census was carried out under the auspices of Lord Ripon, the British Viceroy of India at the time, and counted a population of 288 million in 1881. Since then, a census has been held every 10 years in India. The salient features of India’s demography are as follows:

Population too large for area: India’s 2019 population is ­estimated at 1.37 billion and is growing at an annual rate of 1.08 percent. One of every six people on the planet live in India, and between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the country grew by 17.7 percent, adding 181.5 million people. The country has doubled in size in just 40 years, and is expected to unseat China as the world’s most populated country in the next decade. India’s population is projected to achieve its peak of around 1.7 billion during the decade 2060–2070.

There are 28 states and 8 UTs in India (Andaman and ­Nicobar, Chandigarh, Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Delhi-National Capital Region, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Lakshadweep, and Puducherry). Among them, Delhi, ­Puducherry, and Jammu and Kashmir have their own legislature. States’ populations vary massively in size—the largest, Uttar Pradesh, holds almost 200 million people, while the smallest, Sikkim, just over half a million. Uttar Pradesh is larger than most countries in the world. If it were a country in its own right, it would be the fifth largest in the world, falling just behind China, India, the United States, and ­Indonesia. Two other Indian states are home to more than 100 million people—­Maharashtra and Bihar.1

The picture of the population growth in India accords fairly well with the theory of demographic transition, and the country is now believed to have entered the fifth phase, usually characterized by rapidly declining fertility. In terms of number, the population keeps changing all the time. Population growth is determined by the annual growth rate, which is calculated in percent per annum. In India, population growth is mainly the result of the natural increase of population. Birth rates and death (or mortality) rates are the two major determinants of the population trend. After independence, special measures undertaken by the health and family planning programs reduced the infant mortality rate (IMR) and the maternal mortality rate (MMR), causing a decline in death rates. Birth rates, too, have declined over the years, but the line has not matched the decline in death rates, thus leading to high population growth.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu achieved the ideal total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 in 1989 and 1992, respectively. Since then, several big states—Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, and West Bengal—have brought down fertility rates to replacement levels. Three other states—Gujarat, Haryana, and Assam—are poised to join them by 2020. The TFR in some states like Goa and West Bengal has fallen to nearly European levels. Bihar, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh (30 percent of India’s population) are, however, responsible for pulling the country back. Their neighbors, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand (10 percent of the country’s population) have also been tardy but they are moving toward the 2.1 TFR goal; for them the target looks attainable by 2021. The National Family Health Survey and the District Level Health Surveys show that most poor families, if assured of two living children, do not want more. But this is not the case in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan, where poor parents consciously want more than two children. The primacy to population stabilization in these three states is, therefore, essential (Chandra 2016).

The population growth rate fell by almost half in three decades—from 2.3 percent in 1985 to 1.2 percent in 2014. It will take another three decades or more for total fertility and mortality rates to approximate toward each other and for India’s population to stabilize (Roy 2016).

1. Density of population: India as a whole has a population density of 416 people per square kilometer, which ranks 31st in the world. The density of population is calculated as a ratio of the number of persons per square kilometer of land area. Normally, the density of population is very high in urban and industrial areas and quite low in rural areas. In Mumbai, the population density is 21,000 people per square kilometer (54,000/square mile). India is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The density of population determines the magnitude of the burden that India is being called upon to carry and determines the future potential of growth. The availability of natural resources and the use of technology determine the density of population with a higher standard of living. So the density of population is an index of either prosperity or poverty of a country.
2. Sex composition: The sex ratio of a population is determined by the number of females for every 1,000 males. This helps in understanding the equality of males and females in society, which consequently gives an idea of the nation’s culture. India’s sex ratio has always been on the lower side. States like Kerala and the UT of Puducherry, however, have a higher sex ratio than the major states. In India, there is a higher ratio of males in the population. This may be attributed more to sociological factors, which explain the low preference for the female child in the family. Of late, female feticide and infanticide have come to light. In the absence of proper attention, the female child falls an easy prey to diseases caused by undernutrition. This has led to an imbalance in the sex ratio.
3. Age composition: The analysis of age composition of the population can determine the proportion of labor force in the total population of the country. Generally, population is divided into three groups on the basis of age structure: 0 to 14, 15 to 59, and 60 and above. The higher child population in India has resulted from a higher birth rate and fall in the IMR. Population of the 0 to 14 age group is increasing, and this is a dependent population. About one-half of India’s population is less than 20 years of age. Such a large population of youth has its own social, economic, and political implications. The Adolescent population, between 10 to 21 years, is broken down into three stages that make up the age period. During each stage, varying levels of physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development begin to take place, and these adolescents constitute about one-fifth of the population. They are especially relevant to the future growth and are the most significant part of the population of India.2
4. The proportion of working population (age group 15 to 60 years) stands at around 40 percent and includes the population below 15 years as well (i.e., child labor). But the proportion of elderly population, in the age group 60 and above, has been increasing. Thus, the proportion of children and elderly people is increasing, and both these groups are considered dependent because generally they are supposed to be nonworking. In India, a high percentage of below 15-year population and low rates of labor participation among women are also responsible for a high percentage of the nonworking population.
5. Occupational structure: The number of people in a population involved in different economic activities helps assess the growth of the country’s economy. The occupational structure is the distribution of the population across different occupational sectors: primary, secondary, and tertiary. This is an important element of the population of India.
6. Rural–urban composition: The rural–urban composition of India’s population reflects on the pattern of living of the country’s population. In India, the majority of the population lives in rural areas. There is, however, a growing trend for the gradual shift of population from rural to urban areas. About 67 percent of the population lived in rural areas in 2017. This indicates a massive dependence on agriculture and other rural industries. Urban areas have registered a higher rate of growth and this has happened because urban centers have expanded in area and encroached upon the surrounding villages, as people continue to pour into urban centers in search of jobs and a better living. India’s largest city is Mumbai, closely followed by Delhi. Other major cities in India are Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad. There are 53 cities in India with a population of at least one million. The number of Indians living in urban areas has been increasing at a rapid rate.
7. Life expectancy: The average life expectancy at birth in India has been gradually increasing. The life expectancy at birth in 1969 was 47 years, growing to 60 years in 1994, and 69 years in 2019.3 The increase in the life expectancy have become possible due to fall in the infant mortality and availability of better medical and health facilities. It compares favorably with the level of life expectancy attained in developed countries.
8. Literacy rate in India: In India, the level of literacy has been rising. In 2011, India had a literacy rate of 74 percent—82 percent for men and 65 percent for women. The literacy rate varies wildly by state. Bihar is the least literate with a rate of 63.82 percent. The population of India uses numerous languages to converse across the county, along with many additional tongues and dialects. Although twenty-two languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, two languages (English and Hindi) are the official languages of the Indian government. Forty-four percent of the population uses Hindi as their mother tongue.
9. Ethnic diversity: India’s population has wide ethnic diversity. The concentration of religious minorities in the strategically located peripheral areas is not without its social, economic, and political implications. Data on ethnicity is not collected by the Indian census, although the CIA World Factbook estimates the population is 72 percent Indo-Aryan, 25 percent Dravidian, and 3 percent ­Mongoloid and other. Hinduism is the most common religion in India, accounting for about 80 percent of the population. Islam is the second largest religion at 13 percent of the population. Other major religious groups in India are Christians (2.3 percent), Sikhs (1.9 percent), Buddhists (0.8 percent), and Jains (0.4 percent). ­People who claimed no religion are officially recorded under ‘other’ by the census. In 2011, 0.9 percent of Indians selected the “No ­Religion” category.4

In sum, the general profiles of Indian demography are as follows:

1. Population too large for the area of the country
2. High density of population
3. High growth rate of population
4. Overwhelming proportion of rural population
5. Unbalanced sex ratio
6. High percentage of nonworkers
7. Uneven occupational structure
8. Lopsided age structure
9. Increase in life expectancy
10. Vast ethnic diversity

Demographic dividend and quality of population: India’s population is what contributes to her socioeconomic structure and the diverse cultural scenario. The quality of population can be judged from life expectancy, level of literacy, and level of training of the people. Keeping these parameters in mind, the quality of population in India is low. A rapidly growing population makes for a large young workforce that not only enables higher economic growth but also makes it easy to take care of a growing number of older people as they live longer. The perception of the demographic dividend is sounding more and more clichéd when one sees the abysmal impact of inadequate health and education facilities on millions of young men and women, particularly in the northern states such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana. In the West, the term is used to signify the proportion of working people vis-à-vis the retirees. In India, the so-called dividend is actually represented by a disproportionately high number of young people in six high-fertility states, many of whom are unemployable (Chandra 2016). Some of the demographic features are indicated in Table 6.1

Table 6.1 Related Indicators for Demographic features

(Source: Census and Economic Information Center (CEIC), https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/india/employed-persons)

Population and India’s economic development: India added 180 million to its population in the decade following 2001 to reach a total population figure of 1.21 billion. At a decadal growth rate of 17 percent, the country’s population is expected to surpass China’s 1.3 billion by 2024. At the same time, the Indian landmass is only a third of the Chinese landmass. The burgeoning Indian population is, thus, exerting tremendous pressure on the finite resources of the country. The large population is not working in India’s favor. It’s not just depleting resources but also affecting the cultural fabric of the nation. As agricultural land becomes scarce, food security gets threatened and fragmentation of land holdings makes agriculture uneconomical. Rural to urban migration puts a strain on urban infrastructure, leading to proliferation of slums, pollution, and poor civic amenities. The current workforce is plagued by poor quality of skill upgrading and threatened by automation. The proportion of elderly to the total population is likely to rise to 8 percent by 2030, putting pressure on the already stretched social security systems. This raises issues of making the amenities available to all and the fiscal sustainability of this.

The government’s plans to improve railways, roadways, connectivity, or programs such as the Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan cannot work because overpopulation over stresses resources. Their wear and tear is quicker. Social services like education and health care come under immense strain, and there is a shortage of houses and civic amenities.

Unemployment is particularly of concern as education becomes difficult to disseminate and be provided to one and all. This has a direct effect on the quality of living. While the youth bulge is the driver of the problem, there are other factors at play. As India continues to transition from a largely agrarian-based economy into something more modern, its citizens want a slice of the pie. Young people, armed with smartphones, are not content scratching out a life of subsistence farming or working as laborers. To keep up with the demand, India needs to employ around a million people each month. While jobs are being created, they fall well short, causing unemployment to spike. Millions of jobless and disaffected youth could turn India’s demographic dividend into a disaster. Demographic dividend will flow if India is able to find jobs for the growing labor force. Requirements of feeding and clothing have to be met, but tend to lower both savings and investment. These issues put together have adverse effects on the economy—reduced rate of capital formation, lower standard of living, adverse effect on per capita income, and so on. Increasing population requires more of consumption expenditure, and this leads to less capital expenditure, which leads to lower per capita income in the subsequent period. This is what one can call the vicious circle of poverty (Modi 2017). There is no wonder that around 300 million people lived below the poverty line in 2011–2012.

Population policy and the way ahead: Population dynamics and sustainable development have strong interlinkages. There is need to take serious measures to manage the population growth. An important measure to reduce the birth rate is the promotion of education, especially among the female population of the country. Educated men and women accept the small family norm and more readily take family planning measures such as the use of contraceptives. It has been said that “development is the best contraceptive.” When educated women are employed, moreover, their tendency to bear and rear more children falls. It should be ensured that the fruits of economic development reach the poor people. For this land reform measures and income redistribution policies should also be effectively implemented. If the standards of living of the poor go up as a result of economic development, they will readily adopt the small family norm.

The government has begun to view family planning as a social issue and launched Mission Parivar Vikas to reduce fertility rates in some of the most populous districts. It has also launched a skilling program under the National Skill Development Corporation. There has also been a focus on agriculture to make it remunerative. The Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM) is an attempt at providing urban amenities in rural areas to stem the rural to urban migration. The National Health Protection Scheme is the first step toward universal health coverage.

Focusing excessively on having fewer babies can land a country in the position China is now. Its decades-old one-child policy, only recently abandoned, has led to a situation in which its population is getting older faster than it is getting more prosperous. A better way to try to shape the future is to forget about population control per se and instead aim at improving the quality of lives. This needs revolutionizing mother and child care so that women are healthy and do not have too many children too early and those that are born do not die before reaching healthy adulthood. Simultaneously, policy must focus on better education and skill development and improving the quality of public health so that society’s disease burden is lowered. This way the demographic dividend will be delivered by a more productive workforce. India should take care of the quality of life of the population and economic growth rates will take care of themselves (Roy 2016).

The skilling of human resources must be accompanied by an improvement in education, with a greater focus on research and development. At the same time, cities need to expand vertically rather than horizontally, which is using up scarce land resources (Saikia 2018). An empirical study has, however, concluded that for every unit increase in population, the GDP grows by 3.383108 units. This shows that population growth has a positive impact on India’s economic development.5 For harnessing the demographic advantage, India needs to build the capacity and infrastructure for skilling/reskilling/upskilling existing and new entrants to the labor force. According to the NITI Aayog (2018b), the goals to be met until 2022–2023 are as follows:

1. Increase the proportion of formally skilled labor from the current 5.4 percent of India’s workforce to at least 15 percent
2. Ensure inclusivity and reduce divisions based on gender, location, organized/unorganized, and so on
3. India’s skill development infrastructure should be brought on par with global standards by
   1. developing internationally compliant national occupation standards (NOS) and the qualification packs (QP) that define a job role
   2. making all training compliant with the National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF)
   3. anticipating future skill needs to adapt skill development courses
4. Skill development should be made an integral part of the secondary school curriculum

It is also important to note that there is a demographic divergence between regions in India and this should be seen not as a problem but as an opportunity for overall socioeconomic development in the country. And to make it happen, the policy focus has to be on education, health, skills, and gainful employment, especially women’s participation in the workforce; safe, voluntary, and gainful migration; and inclusive urbanization (Singh 2019a).

In the end it is well to remember that India is at a stage where birth rates are falling but the population continues to grow due to the fact that more than 30 percent of the population is young and in the reproductive age group. Drawing from Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech on August 15, 2019, the NITI Aayog has started drafting a roadmap for “population stabilization” in India. It organized a national consultation titled “Realizing the vision of population stabilization: leaving no one behind” with the Population Foundation of India (PFI). This road map is expected to address key gaps in India’s family planning programs. Some also believe that if the government uses its people judiciously for the nation’s growth, the high population of India could also be an asset. Family planning is considered universally as the smartest development investment. It remains to be seen what new and democratic dimensions the NITI Aayog brings to the Table.6

Endnotes

1. 1. World Population Review. n.d. “India Population 2020.” http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/india-population, (accessed September 6, 2019).
2. 2. Toppr. n.d. “Population of India.” https://www.toppr.com/guides/geography/population/population-of-india/, (accessed September 10, 2019).
3. 3. The Hindu Business Line. April 11, 2019. “India’s Population Grew at 1.2% Average Annual Rate Between 2010 and 2019: UN.” https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/indias-population-grew-at-12-average-annual-rate-between-2010-and-2019-un/article26803237.ece, (accessed December 4, 2019).
4. 4. World Population Review. n.d. “India Population 2020.” http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/india-population, (accessed September 6, 2019).
5. 5. Bhanu Phani Krishna Koduru and Archana Tatavarthi. March 2016. “Effect of Population Growth on Economic Development in India.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309158950_Effect_of_Population_Growth_on_Economic_Development_in_India, ­(accessed September 11, 2019).
6. 6. The Wire, December 20, 2019. NITI Aayog to Start Drafting Plan for ‘Population Stabilisation’. https://thewire.in/government/niti-aayog-population-explosion, (accessed March 4, 2020).