Opinion Sanjaya Baru writes: India becoming most populous nation – is it a bane or boon?

When China declared its One Child policy, many among the Indian elite campaigned in favour of such a policy at home. While the government of the day rejected the “one-child” policy, it launched “Do Ya Teen Bas” followed by “Hum Do, Hamarey Do” campaigns. Communal politics thrived on blaming the Muslim community for India’s population growth. Mass poverty, it was declared, was a consequence of excessive breeding by the poor. The latter view was pervasive till studies showed that families of the poor are larger because each child brings in additional income that may be marginally more than the food and other necessities consumed. So larger families are a response to poverty, not the cause.

The change in the population discourse began when both fertility and birth rates began to fall in the socially-advanced states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Research related the decline with literacy, education and health status of women, among other factors. If the rest of India can mimic Kerala, it was argued, then India’s population problem will become manageable. Indeed, that has begun to happen.

In May last year, it was reported that the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) had shown that the total fertility rate (TFR) — an average of the number of children that would be born to any woman in her lifetime — had declined to 2.0 in 2019-21. This was marginally below what is called the “replacement level fertility rate” — of 2.1 — that is, the level at which a given population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next, and so results in zero net growth of population.

The pattern of population growth has had many consequences for economic policy, including for trade policy, internal and external migration, political demographics, demand for public services, the use of natural resources and inter-regional variations in growth. Almost all these challenges were addressed within the wider framework of population growth being a bane rather than a boon. India’s multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral trade agreements have been demanding access to overseas jobs, employment visas and so on, in the relentless pursuit of overseas employment opportunities. India remains a strong advocate of out-migration, even as the present political dispensation opposes in-migration.

So, where does the celebratory response to India’s new status as the world’s most populous come from? Clearly from the feeling that in a world of declining population growth, especially among the developed economies, Indians would spread out and remain the diaspora over whom the sun would never set. Without doubt, out-migrating Indians have become assets for many developed economies — from the US to Australia, from Portugal to Japan. The question is when would all Indians become assets for their homeland?

The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, answered that question in a 1955 note to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru had invited Friedman to study the Indian approach to planning and offer his views. Friedman was not in favour of public investment in manufacturing, but strongly advocated public investment in education. Titled “A Memorandum to the Government of India 1955”, Friedman said, “the present writer is convinced that the fundamental problem for India is the improvement of the physical and technical quality of her people, the awakening of a sense of hope, the weakening of rigid social and economic arrangements, the introduction of flexibility of institutions and mobility of people, the opening tip of the social and economic ladder people of all kinds and classes.”

Friedman’s key observation, based on his study of American economic history, was that “in any economy, the major source of productive power is not machinery, equipment, buildings and other physical capital; it is the productive capacity of the human beings who compose the society. Yet what we call investment refers only to expenditures on physical capital; expenditures that improve the productive capacity of human beings are generally left entirely out of account. In the United States, for example, only about one-fifth of the total income is return to physical capital, four-fifths to human capital.”

Hence, Friedman wrote to Nehru, invest in human capital. Convert people from being liabilities into assets. An ill-educated, ill-equipped, socially and culturally backward people are an economic liability. Educated, healthy, productive and capable people are a national asset. Indeed, an asset to humanity.

Yet, even today we do not have a socially and economically relevant education policy except in patches. The best schools are increasingly putting out students into the global market. Out-migration of students has risen sharply over the past decade. If this is one end of the spectrum, at the other end provincial and communal politicians are obsessed about history and language, not worried about basic learning skills and the creation of a knowledge-based economy and society.

What we are left with is a skewed educational system that on the one extreme produces pupils for the global market and, on the other, puts out poorly educated, linguistically limited, bigoted and chauvinistic youth who have to be retrained to be employed. Into the vacuum created by inadequate public investment in school education, the private sector is rushing in and now boldly demanding a change of policy that will allow for-profit educational institutions. A nation that cannot offer proper education to all will forever find population a bane rather than a boon.

The writer is a policy analyst