Population has stabilised, employability and good health are the key areas

“The future never resembles the past — as we all know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect.” These were the opening lines of John Maynard Kenyes’ 1937 paper ‘Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population’.

More than eight decades after Keynes flagged likely challenges that falling population can bring about in an economy, his paper has found stark relevance in India, where two states — Uttar Pradesh and Assam — have proposed legislation to control population through a system of incentives and disincentives.

As expected, these policies have triggered a political debate, with those against the proposals arguing that these are political propaganda vehicles masquerading as legislative changes. The political sabre rattling aside, a country’s population size plays an influential role in its economy.

The central long-run question facing India is to spin jobs and multiply income in a sustainable way. Productive jobs are vital for growth. A good job is the best form of inclusion. The popular argument advocating population control is that fewer the numbers joining the queue of young people seeking jobs, more will be the likelihood of making opportunities available for the hopefuls.

According to government data, even during the Indian economy’s rosiest years during 2004-05 to 2009-10 when annual growth averaged close to 9 percent, the economy generated no more than 2 million jobs for the 50 million who joined the workforce.

Of India’s 1.35-billion population, 60 percent are of the working age. On an average, a million people join the queue of job seekers every month.

How many workers will industry and services have to absorb in the next decade? How many will they absorb if they continue creating jobs as they have in the past? Could the demographic dividend turn into a demographic curse as some have argued?

These are questions that one often hears to buttress the argument favouring a State-driven population control policy. But, as Keynes argued eight decades ago and many contemporary economists point out, population and its size have a more layered bearing on the broader economy than what is obvious through a zero-sum game binary framework.

As a starting point, a few facts are in order. India’s total fertility rate (TFR) across the majority of the states has decreased, the findings of the first phase of the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) released by the Union health ministry in December have shown. The result indicates that India's population may be stabilising.

Of the 17 states analysed in the NFHS-5 data, except for Bihar, Manipur and Meghalaya, all other states have a TFR of 2.1 or less, which implies that most states have attained replacement level fertility.

The strategy on population, demography and economy, therefore, should move beyond containing population, which is yesterday’s problem, as the NHFS data on TFR suggests. The focus should rather move towards how to accelerate inclusion and growth together.

The approach to inclusion must shift from hand-outs to more rapid growth of productive enterprises and jobs. Not only is inclusion by this strategy more sustainable, it is also more respectable. For too long the political and policy debate has been stuck in contention between those who want more subsidies to compensate the poor and those who root for more GDP growth.

While industry is creating jobs, too many such jobs are informal. On the other hand, employment growth in services has been slow in recent years. India’s challenge is to create the conditions for faster growth of productive jobs outside of agriculture.

For any job, particularly outside of subsistence farming, the first necessary condition is education. India should invest more in its social infrastructure to boost the productivity of its people, and thereby raise growth.

Despite substantial increases in education investments under schemes such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, there is a paradox that stares brazenly. At 97 percent, India’s enrolment rate in primary education (Grades 1-5) is comparable to that of developed countries. While this is a commendable achievement in itself, various surveys, indicate that we are currently in a learning crisis: an estimated number of 50 million students have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN), the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction.

All these mirror the constraints of an economy and society caught in a peculiar flux, which perhaps fits into Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis in Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Bauman classifies modern society that “cast[s] employment as a key – the key – to the resolution of the issues of, simultaneously, socially acceptable personal identity, secure social position, individual and collective survival, social order and systemic reproduction.”

The National Education Policy 2020, to be sure, places adequate emphasis on the curriculum aspect, with increased focus on “reading, writing, speaking, counting, arithmetic, and mathematical thinking-throughout the preparatory and middle school curriculum, with a robust system of continuous formative/adaptive assessment to track and thereby individualise and ensure each student's learning”.

Education, skills and healthcare will improve employability. State-driven policies should focus on these more than on containing population growth that appears to have stabilised.