Brief Notes on Population Growth in India

Brief Notes on Population Growth in India

India’s Population Growth:

1. There is a difference between magnitude and pace of population increase.

i. Magnitude is the number of persons added each year or each decade to a given population.

ii. Pace is the speed or the rate at which the increase takes place.

a. It is recorded in per cent per year e.g. a increase of two persons for every 100 persons in the base population.

b. India’s population has been steadily increasing from 36.1 crores in 1951 to 102.8 crores in 2001.

2. After 1981, rate of population growth started declining gradually.

i. During this period, birth rates declined rapidly.

ii. Even then 18.2 crores people were added to the total population in the 199 alone. It is an annual addition larger than ever before.

3. It describes that despite the decline in growth rates, number of people being added every decade is steadily increasing.

4. It is because of steady increase in absolute numbers of people.

i. India has a very large population when a low annual rate is applied to a very large population. It yields a large absolute increase.

ii. When more than one hundred crore people increase even at a lower pace the total numbers being added becomes very large.

iii. India’s current annual increase in the population of 1.5 crore is large enough to neutralise efforts to conserve the resources endowment and environment.

5. Declining trend of growth rate is indeed a positive indicator of the efforts of birth control. Despite this the total additions to the population base continued to grow. It is hoped that India over takes China in 2045 to become the most populous country of the world.