@ 65 India's population is still young

It has added between 250 million and 350 million people every decade

On January 26, 1950, when the Constitution of India came into force and a new Republic was born, the country was smaller, younger, but with a far bleaker outlook.

Sixty-five years later, some expected and some unexpected changes have transformed the country.

Census data shows that in 1951 India had 361 million people. To put this in perspective, today just Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh alone have more numbers. Since 1950, India has added one-quarter to one-fifth of its own population every ten years — until this last decade, when population growth fell to its lowest ever level. Except the first decade after the founding of the Republic, India has added between 250 and 350 million people every decade.

In 60 years, India’s population tripled. Even today, the decadal growth rates in the northern States are over 20 per cent, where Kerala and Tamil Nadu were 40 years ago.

If India is seen as a young country today, it was even younger at the time of the founding of the Republic. The median age was just 21 years, as opposed to over 25 today. Nearly half the population was under the age of 20 as opposed to 38 per cent today.

But a child born in 1951 was only expected to live until the age of 37 — now up to 64. India’s Infant Mortality rate (IMR) was a staggering 146 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, now down to 40. The average woman had 5.6 children, over double today’s rate. Approaching replacement levels of 2.1 children per woman — a milestone India is just a few years away from — must have appeared nearly impossible. Adult mortality too has more than halved over the last 60 years.

But here’s a little-noticed demographic quirk of India’s declining fertility. While the popular narrative is one of women having fewer children, later in life, 60 years of fertility data show that the mean age at which women have their children has actually fallen. What this implies is that women still have their children in their early 20s, but then stop after two or three children, meaning fewer women in their thirties and forties in fact are now having children.

In 1951, India’s literacy rate was 18.33 per cent — fewer than one in every five adults was literate. This is now up to 73 per cent, and both the rural-urban and male-female gaps in literacy are down to their lowest ever rates. But the numbers also show just how big a head-start the southern states have had over their northern neighbours.

Kerala’s literacy rate in 1951 was the same as Bihar’s in 2001. The sex ratio was skewed against girls at birth even 60 years ago, and is even more so now. Fifty years ago, this was an extremely rural country; four out of every five Indians lived in villages. India has indeed urbanised in the last half century, but this has happened far slower than expected. As of the 2011 Census, nearly 70 per cent of India was still rural.

In 1950, India was more urban than China. Yet by 2005, China was 41 per cent urban to India’s 29 per cent, and by 2025 it will be 64 per cent urban to India’s 38 per cent, according to projections by McKinsey.

“Despite significant fluctuations over the past few decades, urban growth has, at best, been modest in India. Moreover, contemporary growth scenarios in India cast serious doubts on the prospect for rapid urbanisation in the future,” Amitabh Kundu, an expert on urbanisation, and retired professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, said.

Migration — migrants as a percentage of the total population — Mr. Kundu says, has reduced steadily over the last few decades, despite the popular perception that it is growing; the bulk of urbanisation is explained by the expansion of cities, and their merging with nearby villages.

What has exploded are India’s megacities; between 1950 and 2005, Delhi — and this is the city alone, not its satellites – grew to 11 times its size.

In 1950, the world had just two megacities (with a population of over 10 million) — New York City and Tokyo. By 2015, the world had 22, three of the ten biggest — Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata - being in India. By 2030, Mumbai and Delhi will be the world’s second and third biggest cities, as Tokyo and New York flatten, and Sao Paulo and Mexico City grow, but slowly. By then, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will also be megacities, by U.N. projections.

As it stands, there are many Indians today, for whom the last 65 years have been transformative in varying degrees. After the first three decades in which there was virtually no decline in poverty, the official count of those in poverty has fallen from 45 per cent of the population in 1993-4 to 22 per cent as of 2011-12. Deep-seated inequalities along caste, gender and religious lines remain, but gaps have substantially narrowed in the last 65 years.