FALLING FERTILITY AND DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND

Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: Human Resource

What is the issue?

A concerted policy to harness the demographic dividend is the need of the hour.

What is Demographic transition?

TFR is an indicator of the average number of children expected to be born to a woman during her reproductive span.

It has two components

However, it is fertility transition that plays a decisive role in determining the demographic dividend of any population.
The steady decline in the TFR has been the main driver of the slowing down of population growth in India in the recent decades.
Consequently, this has several implications for policy.
The factors that contributed to a fall in the TFR include increasing mobility, delayed marriage, access to higher education, and greater financial independence of women.
While in the rural areas the fertility rates in the higher age groups, that is, among mothers aged above 35 has fallen, fertility of older women has grown in urban areas.
However, the overall trend is that of falling female fertility rates.
The population parameters also indicate that the demographic transition in India has not been uniform.

What are the reasons?

It was found that education too had a role to play with regard to fertility rates among women.
Although in general, fertility is lower among educated women, in urban areas, fertility rates among women in their 30s are higher among the better educated than the less educated women.
This is because better educated women have been able to delay marriage and childbirth.
However, in the urban areas fertility has been falling faster than expected.
As of 2017, the TFR of urban India has fallen to 1.7, which is lower than the replacement level.
Although the population growth is set for a slowdown, an increase in the share of the working age population points to the advantage of the demographic dividend in India.

What should be done?

An improvement in the dependency ratio due to the demographic dividend leads to the hypothesis that the increase in the working age population would lead to acceleration in growth.
But, there is no concerted effort to build human capital to take advantage of the demographic dividend on the part of policymakers.
The benefits of the demographic dividend can be reaped only if sufficient investments are made for basic infrastructure, health, educational attainment, and skill upgradation of the workforce, apart from the creation of sufficient numbers of suitable jobs to provide employment to the burgeoning workforce.

This is because the available workers would not be absorbed spontaneously to deliver high growth.

To harness the demographic dividend, therefore, it is necessary that people in the working age are gainfully employed and that those working have proper education and skills so that they are productive in the workplace.