India should not copy China’s birth-control policies and instead try to learn from its neighbour’s experience of countering the challenges of an ageing population, experts have said.
Experts told HT that it is already too late for China to reverse the falling fertility rate, and the one-child policy, which is said to have kept China’s population down by hundreds of millions, should have been reversed at least three decades ago.
China’s latest census on Tuesday revealed that its population increased by only about 72 million in the last decade to reach 1.41 billion compared to India’s 1.37 billion.
The world’s most populated country is now staring at a shrinking labour force, an ageing population dependent on social welfare, and falling demand in the years ahead.
“India should stop making population an excuse (for all its problems) and plan for a large population through investment in health, nutrition and skill development,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the New Delhi-based Population Foundation of India.
“Population is a boon, not a bane,” said Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert at the Beijing-based think-tank Centre for China and Globalisation, indicating that India should not put in place any strict birth-control measures.
For China, Huang said the situation is going to get “worse and worse” as “demand shrinks, labour force shrinks, and the burden of pension goes up”.
Huang added, “India is in a much better situation. Now and in the future. If you look at the number of births, India has twice as many as China’s children per year. I am very jealous of India frankly.”
“Population is positive, future population is strength. Not weakness,” said Huang, who has studied and researched on demographics at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities in the US.
Yi Fuxian, a scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has long argued that India’s population has already overtaken China’s because officials here had overestimated the number of births between 1990 and 2016 by almost 90 million.
In an email interaction with HT, Yi shared a paper he had written on China’s latest census.
“On May 22, 2017, I was invited to speak at a seminar on demographic situation and economic development organised by Peking University. I said at the symposium that China’s population was overestimated by 90 million (100 million if taking account of Chinese migration to other countries), and India’s population had already overtaken China’s,” he wrote in the paper.
India has maintained a fertility rate of around 2.3, which indicates that its population may surpass China’s by 2023 or 2024, He Yafu, an independent demographer told Chinese state media on Tuesday, which is sooner than a UN prediction in 2019 that this would happen by 2027.
Some Chinese demographers also predicted that India’s population may overtake that of China as early as in 2022.
Huang said that in the future, India will experience a sharp decline in fertility rate. “When India gets richer, I think you also need to handle this problem. But now I think the people in India have the mindset of China 30 years ago, which is that we have too many people. That’s not the case,” he said.
“India’s population is certainly young compared to China and bodes well for the future. Demographers call this advantage ‘demographic dividend’, which means the share of the working age population has risen, implying a fall in dependency ratio. We must learn from China’s experiences and the proven inefficacy of coercive population policies,” Muttreja said.
Muttreja said that every year, 12 million to 14 million people enter the workforce in India, and India needs to take advantage of that “dividend”.
For that, India should invest in quality education, particularly for girls, different skill-building initiatives, and identifying employment pathways. Women’s empowerment and a greater gender equitable environment will assist girls and young women to complete their education, delay marriage and pregnancy and enter the labour force, she argued.
“Stepping up investments in health, nutrition, and social conditions will naturally result in fertility decline and help India achieve its development goals,” she added.
