Thursday, March 16, 2017

India: Total Fertility Rate

A United Nations document "World Population Prospects - The 2006 Revision" (PDF file) has India's total fertility rate (TFR, number of children per woman, projected, "medium variant")

2005-2010: 2.81
2010-2015: 2.54
2015-2020: 2.32

The "World Population Prospects, 2015 revision"  has revised these to:

2005-2010: 2.80
2010-2015: 2.48
2015-2020: 2.34

The Indian National Family Health Survey (NFHS) has these total fertility rate figures.

NFHS-3 (2005-2006): 2.7
NFHS-4 (2015-2016): 2.2

As you can see, NFHS-3 is right in the middle of the UN figures; but NFHS-4 shows TFR has fallen faster than the medium-variant projection.

Per the 2005 UN document, India's 2050 population ("medium variant") was projected to be 1.658 billion,  per the 2015 document 1.705 billion.

In the "low variant" of UN's 2015 population projection, India's TFR 2015-2020 is 2.09, and  its population in 2050 is projected to be 1.509 billion.

Thus the "low variant" population projection is still a viable lower bound for India's population;  the "medium variant" is an upper bound that can be tightened substantially, I think.

But we also see that projections just ten years out can be wrong, so perhaps more useful is what India's 2021 census will show.  The low variant is 1.387 billion; the medium variant is 1.404 billion.  The difference is about a Netherlands' worth of population.




Comments (6)

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India appears to be entering the sweet spot for rapid per capita economic growth.
2 replies · active 419 weeks ago
From your lips (or keyboard) to God's ears (or eyes) :)
Based on the performance of other economies whose fertility rates have dropped to replacement or below, as seen in Gapminder. Freeing women from full-time child care caused or promoted explosive economic growth in China and much of East Asia as well as in Europe, the US and other rich countries. India is already growing quite rapidly, and that should continue or increase if the politicians or some other disaster doesn't intervene.
Quoting someone else's summary:
Uttar Pradesh TFR in NFHS-3 (2005-06) was 3.8, but is 2.7 now. Bihar is the worst at 3.4, but down from 4.0 . West Bengal is already sub replacement at 1.8 . All of south India is sub-replacement now, at 1.6-1.8 , as is Maharashtra. Madhya Pradesh is at 2.3, almost there, same as Rajasthan. Only Uttar Pradesh and Bihar exceed 2.5 now among major states, and even so, they've both dropped by almost 1 full person in terms of replacement rate, in the past decade.
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Uttar Pradesh's current (2017) population is 224 million; Bihar is 119 million. These states are simultaneously the most economically backward states in India, as well as the states with the most potential. E.g., India's total foodgrain production is around 260 million tons per year; but development gurus believe that UP-Bihar alone are capable of 500 million tons per year.
2 replies · active 419 weeks ago
"development gurus believe that UP-Bihar alone are capable of 500 million tons per year"

That sounds really amazing. Any references or pointers to this assertion by the said development experts ? Or was it on BRF ?
It was an Indian Express article long, long, long ago. I was looking for more recent similar; I may have been mistaken - it would be the whole Gangetic plain that would be capable of that. One thing was clear from my search that even today, average Indian crop yields per hectare are one-third to one-half of the equivalent Chinese yields. So one can estimate from land under cultivation and potential yield per hectare what the potential output could be.

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