Interpreting Census 2011

The just released Census of India 2011 data contains both good and bad news. First, the good news. Indias decadal population growth rate, which has been a major factor impeding Indias economic progress, has fallen to 17.64 percent in the past decade (2001-2011), from 21.54 percent (1991-2001).When India attained independence from British rule in 1947, the countrys population was 350 million. Today it is 1.21 billion, almost four times as much. It has led to environmental degradation, especially loss of forest cover. Fortunately, food production has quadrupled during the same period, which is why there have been no mass famines since independence. But the country has had to pay a heavy price for failure of its population control programmes. An annual 1.76 percent rise in population translates into almost 18 million people — equivalent to the entire population of Australia — who have to be fed, housed and educated. This is clearly unsustainable because most of them migrate to the cities, since the countryside cannot support them, creating another set of problems. Anyway, better than the relative decline in the overall population growth rate is the geographies where the greatest decline has taken place — in the states that demographer Ashish Bose famously labelled the BIMARU (bimar, sick) states, an acronym for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. In UP, for instance, decadal popul-ation growth declined from 25.9 percent in 1999-2001 to 20.1 percent in 2001-2011. Better still is the census finding that the percentage of literate Indians has risen from 64.8 percent in 2001 to 74 percent currently. It is also encouraging that female literacy has risen faster than of males. Nevertheless, the gender literacy gap — 17 percent — is still too wide, a sad reflection of the countrys persistent social bias against girl children. Although credit is being claimed for the rise in literacy to 74 percent, it means 320 million Indians — a number greater than the entire population of the US — still cannot read or write, a shameful situation. Shockingly, we have by far, the largest number of illiterates of any country in the world. Neighbouring Sri Lanka is close to 90 percent literate, as is China and even Indonesia. Chinas Mao Tse-tung and Indonesias Suharto, now reviled figures for other reasons, at least had the good sense to invest heavily in primary education. India, under Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, didnt. Nehru was enamoured with promoting higher education. Nothing wrong with that, except that primary education was completely neglected, with disastrous consequences. Curiously, some knowledgeable commentators such as Nandan Nilekani, one of the co-founders of Infosys Technologies and currently in charge of the Unique Identification (UID) card project, refer to Indias huge population as a ‘demographic dividend. In his other-wise riveting book Imagining India, Nilekani writes that the countrys ballooning population is a positive, rather than negative, development because it has enlarged the work force. He is mistaken. Those whose numbers are increasing are not, by and large, better educated…