The just released Census of India 2011 data contains both good and bad news. First, the good news. India’s decadal population growth rate, which has been a major factor impeding India’s economic progress, has fallen to 17.64 percent in the past decade (2001-2011), from 21.54 percent (1991-2001).
When India attained independence from British rule in 1947, the country’s population was 350 million. Today it is 1.21 billion, almost four times as much. It has led to environmental degradation, especially loss of forest cover. Fortunately, food production has quadrupled during the same period, which is why there have been no mass famines since independence. But the country has had to pay a heavy price for failure of its population control programmes.
An annual 1.76 percent rise in population translates into almost 18 million people — equivalent to the entire population of Australia — who have to be fed, housed and educated. This is clearly unsustainable because most of them migrate to the cities, since the countryside cannot support them, creating another set of problems.
Anyway, better than the relative decline in the overall population growth rate is the geographies where the greatest decline has taken place — in the states that demographer Ashish Bose famously labelled the BIMARU (bimar, sick) states, an acronym for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. In UP, for instance, decadal popul-ation growth declined from 25.9 percent in 1999-2001 to 20.1 percent in 2001-2011.
Better still is the census’ finding that the percentage of literate Indians has risen from 64.8 percent in 2001 to 74 percent currently. It is also encouraging that female literacy has risen faster than of males. Nevertheless, the gender literacy gap — 17 percent — is still too wide, a sad reflection of the country’s persistent social bias against girl children.
Although credit is being claimed for the rise in literacy to 74 percent, it means 320 million Indians — a number greater than the entire population of the US — still cannot read or write, a shameful situation. Shockingly, we have by far, the largest number of illiterates of any country in the world. Neighbouring Sri Lanka is close to 90 percent literate, as is China and even Indonesia. China’s Mao Tse-tung and Indonesia’s Suharto, now reviled figures for other reasons, at least had the good sense to invest heavily in primary education. India, under Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, didn’t. Nehru was enamoured with promoting higher education. Nothing wrong with that, except that primary education was completely neglected, with disastrous consequences.
Curiously, some knowledgeable commentators such as Nandan Nilekani, one of the co-founders of Infosys Technologies and currently in charge of the Unique Identification (UID) card project, refer to India’s huge population as a ‘demographic dividend’. In his other-wise riveting book Imagining India, Nilekani writes that the country’s ballooning population is a positive, rather than negative, development because it has enlarged the work force. He is mistaken. Those whose numbers are increasing are not, by and large, better educated Indians but the less educated. Nilekani’s demographic dividend thesis could have been valid — and may be proved right in the future — if literacy levels had been higher. As matters stand, India’s growing population is not a benefit but a burden.
So much for the good news: a declining population growth rate and higher literacy. Now for the bad news.
The ratio of boys to girls, bad enough a decade ago, has dropped further, from 927 girls to 1,000 boys in 2001 to 914 per 1,000 boys in 2011 (in most developed countries the ratio is entirely reversed, with more girls than boys). What does this show? Simply that female infanticide is rampant in 21st century India. Earlier, northern states like Haryana and Punjab were most guilty of female foeticide and infanticide. Now this terrible practice, nothing less than cold-blooded murder, has spread to other states.
Against this grim backdrop, we need to introspect why girl children are unwelcome in most parts of India. The answer stares us in the face: gender discrimination remains as strong as ever. The reasons for rampant and persistent prejudice against women are cultural and economic. Silly traditions, like a son being needed to light his father’s funeral pyre, and dowry payable for daughters’ marriages persist and property and inheritance laws in most states and communities are biased in favour of men. Women are routinely discriminated against in social and work places.
The son-preference syndrome exists in China as well, where female infanticide is also prevalent. Beijing’s ‘one child’ policy has made matters worse and there’s a skewed boy/girl ratio in that country too. But South Korea presents an illuminating contrast. There also, society was patrilineal, favouring boys, until quite recently. However, urbanisation and modernisation catalysed attitudinal changes. As a result, women in South Korea have become as valuable as men in workplaces with Korean society now according equal respect to women. That’s the socio-economic development example India needs to emulate.
(Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest and Sunday Observer and author of Family Planning Success Stories: Asia, Latin America and Africa)