Is India Getting Better?
Factfulness, for India.
Prima facie, the answer seems no. As a society, we do not see much in terms of progress. We have become so strongly divided into political camps, religious camps, caste camps, gender camps, etc., that any contradictory fact is not tolerated well. Ingrained are so much some differences, that we can’t even treat a pandemic with an unbiased mind.
Not all is lost but. Even if people fight for things they think matter, in the grand scheme of things what matters is something else. What matters at the core is how much progress the whole country is making together and how much access do we have to good healthcare and education. These are the things that differentiate a rich country from a poor country and a good economy from a bad economy.
Let us see how we have fared on six parameters that are critical for development, and are supposed to help us move forward as a society — population, fertility rate, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, poverty headcount, and female secondary school enrolment. Sure, more factors should be considered, but maybe in subsequent posts.
India has made significant progress since independence, on things that matter.
Population Growth
Let’s start with the behemoth. Our population is huge, and people have this view that it is increasing constantly. But in fact, our growth rate has slowed down. For the first quarter after independence (1950–1975), the population grew at a rate of approx. 2.6% per year. In the second quarter (1976–2000), the population again grew at a similar rate. For the current quarter (2001–2020*) we are seeing a growth rate of 1.5% per year, and with the projected population of 1400 million in 2025, the growth rate would be 1.4%. That’s a whooping ~45% drop from previous quarters. It is also projected to start decreasing from 2060 onwards. For comparison, the current world average population growth rate is ~1.1%.
A yay for resource management in a country where the agencies find it nearly impossible to focus and care for its every citizen!
Fertility Rate
Population growth is closely tied to the fertility rate. The average children a woman gave birth to in 1950 was 5.9. The end of the century saw an average of 3.3 children per woman. Currently, the average fertility rate is about 2.2. So, it can be generalized that for the past 60 years there has been a drop of about 0.9% every year in the number of children being born per woman. It doesn’t matter if you have a neighbor with 5 kids — they lie on the far end of the curve, or you think it’s a religious/caste thing to have more children — more often than not the underlying reason is the level of education and income. As a nation, we have made remarkable improvements to go lower than the world average of 2.4 births per woman.
This drop indicates a few important things that have also gone right to make this happen. Earlier people had more kids because the chances of a few of them dying were high. It also meant more helping hands in the family to earn. Women giving birth to fewer kids point towards better healthcare facilities for the newborn and improvement in societal infrastructure that reduces infections in the newborn, thus reducing the chances of them dying. A reduction in poverty has also shifted the focus from more earning members to fulfill the basic needs to small families with a focus on the quality of life. Needless to say, fewer children also mean less number of women dying during childbirth and more time for women to focus on other things that contribute to the economy. A win-win from all angles!
Life Expectancy
Not only are people living more in India, the rate at which more people are living more is remarkable.
In 1960, the average number of years a person would live in India was ~41.4 years. At the end of the century, life expectancy raised to about 62.5 years, and as of 2017, it stood at about 69.1 years. Here also, India with its improvement rate of 1.1% life years per year has fared better than the world at 0.6% (~2x) and a rich country, say the USA at 0.22% (~5x).
This is an important parameter to note because usually we think people in rich countries are healthier and live more. While it is true that they live more and usually have healthier habits than us, their improvement rate has pretty much saturated and India is fast catching up. Monaco has the highest life expectancy with an average of 89.4 years, whereas the Central African Republic with ~52.8 years has the lowest. Perhaps an average age of 90 years is as good as it can get for humans.
Infant Mortality Rate
Following closely after the life expectancy is the infant mortality rate, because what would you say about a society that cannot protect its most vulnerable — the young and the old? There are plenty of ways a newborn can die, and more of them surviving means an improvement in healthcare services — including basic vaccinations, cleaner water, and less hygiene-related diseases, and in the context of India, perhaps an increasing acceptance of the female gender as well.
In 1950, India’s infant mortality rate was 189 deaths per 1000 children born and decreased at an annual rate of 1.2% for the first quarter. The second quarter saw a decrease rate of 1.9%. With 29.9 deaths per 1000 births as of 2018, and with a projected number of 24.9 for 2025, India is on its way to achieving an annual drop rate of 2.5% for the current quarter. In contrast, the world average drop rate for this quarter would be 1.8%.
Poverty Headcount
With the international poverty criteria of earning less than $2 per day, in 1993 ~45% of India was identified as living under poverty. As of 2011, that proportion dropped down to ~21% of the population. For a similar timeframe, 36% of the world was living below $2 per day in 1990, which dropped to 10% in 2015. Here, people have come out of the last tier of poverty in India at a pace close to the world average.
Secondary School Enrolment for Females
What a lot of girls would take for granted now was only available to a privileged few till about two decades back — going to a secondary school. Year over year India has sent its girls to secondary schools at a rate faster than the world average, 5.8% over 1.7%!
As the saying goes, “If you educate a woman, you educate a nation”. This could be by far the most important change we are seeing, and not just from a gender equality standpoint. An educated woman will more often than not take part in family planning, household income, education, and health of the whole family.
Beacon Of Hope
What all of this tells us, is that despite the image we have about India (mostly thanks to media), and despite all the bad things we see happening around, we are getting better in things that matter. This is not to undermine the things that are still not right. Rising air pollution, food adulteration, ideology based crimes, slow investment in advanced infrastructure, etc. can hold us back from growing at a pace we would like to but increasing levels of education and lowering poverty is a beacon of hope, and are rightly placing India on the correct side of the curve when looking at world averages. A country will never be free of issues, but it should be able to provide a certain quality of life to all its citizens. India is slowly moving there, and in some cases faster than the world combined.
In Hans Rosling’s words, the world can be both bad and better. And India too, is bad and better.
The article was written at the time of onset of the Corona pandemic which can impact all of the above numbers. I am not claiming the data presented in the article to be 100% accurate. Data Sources — Population Pyramid, Trading Economies, Macro Trends, World Pop, Statista, World Bank.
