India’s population growth

#GS-01 Population

For Prelims:

World Population:

• The United Nations has declared that World population has reached 8 billion on 15 November 2022.
• India was the largest contributor to the milestone, having added 177 million people of the last billion people born in the world.

Total Fertility Rate (TFR):

• The total fertility rate in a specific year is defined as the total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and give birth to children in alignment with the prevailing age-specific fertility rates.
• TFR can be calculated as the sum of the age-specific fertility rates for all women multiplied by five.
• India’s TFR has declined from 2.2 to 2.0 at the national level.

States with highest TFR are:

• Bihar (2.98), Meghalaya (2.91), Uttar Pradesh (2.35), Jharkhand (2.26) and Manipur (2.17).

States with lowest TFR are:

• Sikkim (1.1), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1.3), Goa (1.3), Ladakh (1.3), Jammu and Kashmir (1.4) and Lakshadweep (1.4) reported a TFR of less than 1.5 children per woman.

Kerala was the only state that experienced an increase in TFR to 1.8 from 1.6 in 2015-16

Replacement-level fertility:

• Replacement level fertility is the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next.
• In India Total Fertility Rate of about 2.1 children per woman is called Replacement-level fertility.
• A total of 31 States and Union Territories (constituting 69.7% of the country’s population) have achieved fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1.

For Mains:

The causes for declining TFR:

The main reasons for the decline in fertility include:

• increase in adoption of modern family planning methods (from 47.8% in 2015-16 to 56.5% in 2019-21).
• a reduction in unmet need for family planning by four percentage points over the same period.
• significant improvements in access to family planning related information and services.

To know more about India’s Population click here.

Source “India’s population growth is stabilising, it is an indicator of effective health policies, says UN“