The world has a whopping population of 6 billion; apart from this India alone has a population of around a billion. It is surprising but true, India is the first country that has a population policy. Many feel that this enormous population can cause an alarm and it is important to understand the factors that may lead to population explosion and the complex links between population growth rates and levels of development. Apart from this, one should acknowledge that India is amidst the demographic transition with fertility rates definitely declining although not as fast as was expected.

The “Population Problem”
Year 2000 marked its presence with the fact that the world’s population reached to a mammoth of six billion, where alone India’s share was a massive one billion. Alarms echoed over the first country in the world having the population policy that failed miserably in the effort. However, demographers made a note by suggesting that there is no such need to panic.

India is standing amidst a so called “demographic transition”. Moving from the situation of high birthrate and high deathrate to an intermediary stage of high birthrate and low deathrate to an intermediary stage of high birthrate and low deathrate, India still needs to strike a balance with low birthrate and low deathrate.

Demographers have made a note that in compliance with the latest census figures, India has entered the phase of a declining fertility rate although the actual decline is less than what was supposed to be achieved.

Past 50 years
At the time of India’s independence in 1947, the perception of the government authorities was that the growing population of the country acts as a hindrance to the developmental proceedings of country. The CBR that stands for Crude Birth Rate was more that 45/1,000 that year that depicted birth of 45 children per 1,000 people. The Term TFR that stands for Total Fertility Rate defines the number of children that a woman would have in her entire lifetime, which figure was 6 that year. 

Government of India tightened its grip over the CBR to bring the figure down to 27/1,000 by the end of the year 1990 that will further decline to 21/1,000 till the end of the year 2000. Past 50 years. The CBR has dropped but not as much as it was hoped to be. In 1990, the CBR figure was 30.2/1,000, and as per the latest figure, it is a little over 25 per 1,000 populations. Similarly, the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) fell from over 6.0 in the 1940’s to 3.6 in 1991 and the most recently to 3.1.

The Issues

Is this the time of crisis?
There are many demographers who don’t think so, according to United Nations Population Fund report of 1997 on India- “India is undergoing rapid fertility transition with the pace of decline accelerating in recent years”

Birthrates are on the way out all over the country, although the extent is varying and they are beginning to decline faster than the death rates going down, therefore we are slowly but surely moving towards the replacement fertility.

Population- the root of developmental problems
It is often said that communities flooded with the burden of large families will not be able to move forward. Additionally, this has been confirmed that the population becomes confident as their children survive till adulthood and as they become financially stable and able to control their destinies, they choose to have fewer children.

The Indian government’s health expenditure as a proportion of its GNP is one of the lowest in the world and within this meager amount, more then 60% is spent on the family planning programme. It is known to all that the growing population is already the biggest threat to world’s limited resources as it has its negative impacts on atmosphere with declining forest cover, exhausting water supplies and expanding hole in the ozone layer and so on.

Contraceptive technologies
To fight this problem, many women social groups NGOs have come up to advocate the family planning for the interest of poor and women, based on their personal choices. As far as women rights are concerned, women have the right to decide on the number of children they want and to have ease and knowledge of safe contraception to have power over prospective birthrate.

Furthermore, there have been population programmes that encourage research on contraceptives targeting women. As the injectable contraceptives and subdermal implants have reportedly caused irreversible damage to the health of users, these drugs need to be approved by the Indian drug regulatory authorities without the mandatory trials. Definitely, many feel that family planning programme show less interest as well as concern for the poor women which should be targeted primarily.