Knowing India – Demographics – People

Let’s now look into out biggest asset as a country … our people. I will try to keep this concise and relevant … as this topic has the potential to be a pretty long write up.

To start with here is what our population stands at –

(July 2012 est.)

What does this mean? To me it’s just a number and unless I put it into perspective it wont make much sense to me. So let’s see how we can make sense of this number … the world population is 7 billion and we are 1.2 billion … China is also around there at 1.3 billion. Taking liberty of a lot of approximation here, we can say that we are 1/6th of the world in terms of population and together with China we make about 1/3rd of the world. Just 2 countries making up 1/3rd of the world where there are about 200 countries is quite an overwhelming statistic. We are the second most populous country in the world, trailing China by a little bit, and considering the population control China has been able to achieve, we are going to surpass China in population by 2030.

Now is this good for India? Not necessarily … if we don’t manage this population growth well, we’ll have a huge and unmanageable resource crunch in our hands in no time, which in turn will lead to crime and eventually an unlivable social environment. But if we manage it right, and educate people and create job opportunities and use this young population to grow the economy, we might just reap the demographic divided which China has been able to do. But that’s really another discussion.

What else do we know about the people in our country?

We are growing at 1.312% per year (Rank 88), adding 20.6 births (Rank 85) and subtracting 7.43 deaths (Rank 116) from our population per 1000 people every year.

30% of our 1.2 billion people now live in cities, increasing the number of people in cities @ 2.4% every year (that’s our rate of urbanization). Here’s a small graph to show how our most populous cities stack up:

How are we distributed? Here are a few graphs that might explain that …

Now that is our cultural history … and with this much diversity, it IS a miracle that we are still one country.

Let’s look at other demographic variations:

Age distribution:

We are overall a young population with a median age of 26.5 years. The following graphs would shed some light on how this age distribution works for the different sexes.

Since women in general live longer, there are more women of a higher age and therefore the median age for women is slightly higher than men, which you will see in the following graph which talks of Life expectancy at birth – where Indian ranks 161 with an average citizen expected to live 67.14 years:

This leads us directly on to how our sexes are distributed across different age structures. Let’s look at a couple of graphs:

The graph above talks about what ratio of male to female do we see at different age structures. (example: At birth there are 1.12 males per female new born.)

The graph above talks about how our sexes are distributed across different age groups. As we would have expected, the “65 years and over” brackets have more women than men. This is more or less the same scenario in most developed and developing countries.

When we talk of births and deaths and age structure and sexes, we have to look at some other stats which are equally important:

Fertility rate – There are 2.58 children born per woman in India (Rank 82) … Most developed countries are under 2 children per woman, where as sub-Saharan Africa sees anywhere between 4-7 children per woman. So we can see where in the world we’ll see the biggest population growth in the coming years … how this will affect us is the topic of discussion for another time, but one wonders.

Maternal Mortality Rate: 200 women die per 100,000 live births in India (Rank 54). Although we have reduced this from being in thousands after independence, there’s a long way to go as most developed countries have been able to bring this number down to single digits.

Infant Mortality: This is a major factor influencing fertility rate and hence indirectly population growth. It has been seen with every country that fertility rate has shown a decline as the country was able to improve health care and reduce infant mortality. So where do we stand on this? We have 46.07 children (under 1 year of age) dying per 1000 live births in India (rank 49) and when we look at how it is different between the sexes, another picture comes forward (which we all know and dread to accept) – Infant mortality among males is 44.71 and among females it is 47.59 per 1000 live births. Almost 3 more girl babies than boys for each 1000 live births die before they reach the age of 1 year. Again here we have improved a lot since independence, but there is still a long way to go … as most developed countries have been able to reign this to single digits.

One thing that is closely tied to child health and the above stats is Child nutrition, which is measured by Underweight Children under the age of 5 years. Our rank here is 1 (we are at the peak of this!!!) and that is because we have almost half (43.5%) of our children underweight and hence most probably malnourished. This is a place our country, 5th largest economy, growing at 7-8% per year even during recession should do better. Not enough can be said about how we need to do something about it NOW!

This begs a question … how is the health infrastructure in India. So I have tried to summarize it with the following pieces of data … which are used as prime indicators of health infrastructure of any country. Here they are:

Health Expenditure: 2.4% of GDP (Rank 185) is our health expenditure, and we are among the last few in the ranking of all countries, with only Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Burma and North Korea trailing us. Most of the developed nations and even many African countries where health is a serious problem spend upwards of 8% of GDP on health. We clearly have our priorities wrong. Even worse, most of us don’t even know there’s a problem this big in our hands. The positive here is, in spite of this callousness, we have managed to curb Infant Mortality, Maternal Mortality etc significantly since independence and increase Life Expectancy too.

Physician Density : 0.599 – that makes half a doctor per 1000 people.

Hospital Beds : 0.9 – about 1 per 1000 people.

To have a complete understanding of people we have to also factor in metrics like Human Development Index, Poverty, Education, Unemployment etc … since right now we are only discussing demographics and it is already a pretty long post, we’ll leave those for another time.

Data Source: CIA Fact Book – India

Disclaimer: As far as I know this is the best resource for an overview and they update this weekly with the most up-to-date information from a universally accepted and authentic source (Usually like United Nations Data Repository or World Bank Data or from the respective nations’ govt or govt agencies). There is a chance some data may have changed or CIA world fact book may have something wrong … in any case I would be highly obliged if anyone who finds an error or discrepancy points it out to me and also points me to their source of information. Feel free to leave such information in your comments.