India becoming the most populous country can bring more boom than bane.
What are the advantages of India’s population structure?
Total fertility rate of 2.0 - Indicates that India is moving towards the population stabilization.
Worldwide market - India has the potential to become a worldwide market for both production and consumption.
Cheaper workforce - Can lower the manufacturing cost and be a leverage to make India, a worldwide manufacturing market hub.
Demographic dividend - With 68% of the working age population in 2023, India continues to have a demographic window of opportunity for the next 35 years.
How can India translate demographic dividend to economic dividend?
Employment or job creation - If India can generate sufficient and quality jobs for its working age population, realization of demographic dividend will become a reality.
Education and skills - Skilled and educated workforce is critical for better productivity of any economic activity.
Healthy environment - Skilled and healthy workforce reduces excessive public spending on health and helps in greater capital creation.
Good governance - Good governance being transparent creates a healthy environment which will increase the efficiency and productivity of the population.
What are the challenges to Indian demographic dividend?
Stereotypes – Existence of gender stereotypes binding women to household works.
IT sector – Even though India is doing well at software outsourcing the share of population is very low.
The rise of Artificial Intelligence may be a hindrance to the boomed IT industry replacing jobs like coders.
Skilled labor – The number of people skilled in information and communication technology is abysmally low.
Census – Absence of the Census 2021 to know the absolute changes in the demographic dividend.
What is the need of the hour?
Policies that can provide high-quality education, good health care, respectable employment opportunities, good infrastructure, and gender empowerment.
India’s young population needs to be nurtured and transformed into being productive and well-paying jobs.
Quick facts
Carrying Capacity
Carrying capacity is a dynamic concept which changes according to changing technology, the efficiency of production and consumption systems of a country.
Carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, water and other resources available.
