Demography India Vol. 26, No. 1 (1997)

From the Chief Editor’s Desk

THE 50th anniversary of India's Independence is going to be celebrated as a year long event beginning 15 August 1997. India began her 'tryst with destiny' on the same day, fifty years ago, getting her political freedom from the sovereignty of Great Britain after more than 100 years of political struggle. Political Independence has been a long cherished goal and it was expected that India will rise to her full stature of economic, social and political glory once Independence was achieved. Fifty years is also a good occasion in a nation's history to take stock of the situation. During this period we have many significant achievements to our credit, like self-sufficiency in food, rapid industrialization in selected sectors, provision of opportunities for advanced education in science and technology through our great institutions, capacity to launch a satellite in space—of which we can be legitimately proud of. On the other hand, we have failed miserably on some fronts, the impact of which is beginning to darken our face as a nation with sadness and shame.

Two of the major failures we had are: firstly, our inability to provide basic education to all our children and make India a literate country, and secondly, failure on the population front to arrest the rapid growth of our population which is eroding all our developmental efforts. India is one of the least literate societies in the world. India's large pool of technically educated and English speaking layer is deceptive and presents a misleading picture on the levels of education and literacy of the population as a whole. Just to drive home a few facts: in 1991 we had 304 million illiterate among those aged 6 and over and 190 million of them were adult women, aged 15 and over, the overall literacy rate for India as a whole in 1991 was 43% and the female-male ratio in literacy was 61%; the values of overall literacy rates and female-male ratios for Bihar was 31 and 43, Madhya Pradesh 36 and 49, and Uttar Pradesh 33 and 45. The Gross Enrollment Ratio in Primary schools (GERP) among children in the ages 6 to 10 and female-male ratio among them in 1993 according to the Sixth All India Survey were: 73 and 58 in Bihar, 85 and 53 in Rajasthan and 76 and 66 in Uttar Pradesh. Even in 1993, we have only 46 percent of the girls in the age group 5 to 10 enrolled in schools in Uttar Pradesh. If we analyze the data separately for the rural areas and for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the picture is dismal. The Constitutional requirement of the government providing compulsory education for all children in the age group 5 to 14 before 1960 has not been fulfilled even after 37 years.

According to the latest projections of the Standing Committee on Population Projections appointed by the Planning Commission, the population estimate as of mid 1997 is 955.2 million and we are adding a whooping 18 million currently every year compared to about 5 million in 1946-47. Not only our population size is large and our growth rates continue to be high but also the projections for the future are still more depressing. The Standing Committee's projections made until 2016, assuming that the recent trends in fertility and mortality observed during 1982 to 1992 will continue in the future, indicate a population size of 1012 million by year 2001; 1094 million by 2006; 1179 million by 2011 and 1264 million by 2016. Even during 2011-2016 the projected growth rate is high at 1.44%.

The irony is that India was the first country in the world to officially recognize the adverse effects of rapid population growth on development and launched a national programme of family planning as early as 1952 as part of the first Five Year Plan, 1951-
56. The earlier demographic goals set in the Third Plan in 1962 was to have a birth rate of 25 by 1972, and this goal is yet to be realized after 25 years. Though three of our States, Goa, Kerala and TamilNadu, have already achieved replacement levels of fertility, the majority of the States are still far from this goal. According to the Standing Committee, the States of Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh will achieve replacement level of fertility only by the year 2039, 2048 and after 2050 and to cap it all Uttar Pradesh only after 2100.

The dismal performance in basic education and population stabilization seem to be an interrelated phenomena. For some reason or the other, India chose to invest immediately after Independence on heavy industries, higher education with institutions of technology and national laboratories as cutting edges of development, and later on agriculture under Green Revolution, at the neglect of primary and secondary education and of female education, in particular. On the family planning front, emphasis was placed on sterilization, essentially through camp approach, rather on spacing methods to be provided as a part of the primary health care services in which a good quality family planning service delivery system forms an integral part of the maternal and child health services. We failed to build a good quality primary health care system.

It is never too late to bridge these gaps in development. We need a strong will backed by necessary financial allocations to education and health. At this juncture, the community of demographers in the country is requested to send scholarly articles reviewing the trends and patterns in various demographic components of fertility, mortality, nuptiality and migration, their proximate determinants, an analysis of causes and consequences of changes in the demographic components and their proximate determinants and policy recommendations emerging out of such an analysis. The Editorial Board has recommended the dedication of the next issue of Demography India as a Golden Jubilee issue for a critical stock taking and analysis of the demographic phenomena in the country. We welcome scholarly articles from our contributors. They will, of course, be subjected to necessary peer review before publication.

K Srinivasan
Chief Editor, Demography India