Subir Roy: Forget population, target quality of life

India's policy makers have traditionally been concerned with the high growth rate of its population which has been seen to negate its fight against poverty. In recent years, this cause for worry has been turned on its head through the perception of the demographic dividend. A rapidly growing population also makes for a large young workforce which 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.

But between these two simple positions there can be complex ones in between pointing at different directions, making it difficult to say in unequivocal terms whether India is in a sweet spot or not. This seems to be the current position with the total fertility rate (the number of children that a woman is likely to have in the entire reproductive period of her life) falling to almost replacement levels (when births just replace deaths, no more, typically a developed country phenomenon) but the mortality rate (under five) remaining high as is the case in a developing economy. (A poor country with high birth and mortality rates can also have a stable population but that is not what we are looking at.)

India's total fertility rate is rapidly declining, having gone down to 2.3 in 2013 (Sample Registration System) from 4.5 in 1985 (henceforth, all World Bank figures). What is more, it has reached 1.8 for urban areas which is the same as that for the UK and, in fact, just a shade lower than the 1.9 figure for the US. But the urban-rural difference is important as most of Indians live in rural areas whereas most of the population in developed countries lives in urban areas. So India's total fertility rate will take a while to reach those of developed country levels. But there is no uncertainty as to the direction in which it is going.

On the other hand, India's under-five mortality rate (the number of under-five year olds who die per thousand population) remains high despite falling. In 2015, India's under five mortality rate was a colossal 48 (down from 145 in 1985), compared to 10 for Sri Lanka and developed country rates in the three to seven range.

In this situation where the birth rate has been successfully controlled to near first world levels before the death rate could be brought down similarly, what is the scenario ahead? A likely rapid fall in the death rate along with a much slower fall in the total fertility rate is likely to slow down the rate at which the overall population growth rate will continue to fall. The population growth rate fell by almost half in three decades - from 2.3 per cent in 1985 to 1.2 per cent in 2014. It will take another three decades or more for total fertility and mortality rates to approximate towards each other and for India's population to stabilise.

So what should policy focus on now? A short and wrong answer is to concentrate on better use of contraceptives to bring down the birth rate in rural areas. 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. The place to begin is revolutionising 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. The overarching sense is: take care of quality of life and the population and economic growth rates will take care of themselves. Don't keep harping on an eight per cent plus growth rate like a broken record.

subirkroy@gmail.com