The workforce of the future
will come from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar , with
developed States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu hitting — or even bypassing — their
peaks, new census data shows. The Census Commissioner revealed that, two
simultaneous and opposing processes are going on in India , the ‘single year age data’.
On the one hand, States like
Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and
Himachal Pradesh have witnessed a fall in their absolute child population under
the age of 14. “This was to be expected as the reduction in female fertility
that began in the 70s in the southern States begins to have an impact,” said P.
Arokiasamy, demographer and Professor in the Department of Development Studies
at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS).
With the share of these
States — and that of other States like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Uttarakhand that
have had only small increases in child population — in the total child population
falling, the share of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, that still have high fertility,
has risen sharply. One in every three children under the age of 14 in India comes from Bihar
or Uttar Pradesh.
Scenario of children under
14 years in India
|
||
Decline
|
Small Increase
|
Sharp Increase
|
Kerala,
Andhra Pradesh,
Himachal Pradesh
and
|
Tamil Nadu,
Uttarakhand
|
Uttar Pradesh
|
While India as a whole has 31% per cent of its
population under the age of 14, the corresponding number for U.P. is 35.69% per
cent and an astounding 40.1% per cent for Bihar; four out of every 10 people in
Bihar is under the age of 14. This is the
highest such proportion for any State; it is possibly even the world’s highest.
So, while the rest of the country has lowered the proportion of its population
that is under 14, for Bihar , this proportion
has increased by over 10% percentage points since 2001. This makes Bihar as the only State that has added more persons under
the age of 14 than over the age of 60.
Children under the age of
14 years
|
|
|
31%
|
|
40.1%
|
Uttar Pradesh
|
35.69%
|
Simultaneously, developed
States are reaching their peak working age populations, and are ageing faster
than the rest of the country. Tamil Nadu currently has the highest
proportion of its people in the working age population — two out of three
residents of the State are between the ages of 15 and 59. Kerala,
meanwhile, is on the verge of the long-expected beginning of the decline in its
working population; while the absolute number of people in Kerala between the
ages of 15 and 59 has increased slightly, its proportion to the State’s whole
population has declined slightly.
4 out of every 10 people in
|
2 out of every 3 residents
in TN are b/w the ages of 15 and 59
|
Seen together, the two
processes imply that today’s children, who come overwhelmingly from U.P. and Bihar , will form the workforce of the future. This has
major implications for State and Centre policy. For one, it means that northern
States will have to spend more on school education, while southern States can
begin to focus more on quality. The other implication is, as Census
Commissioner C. Chandramouli told that skill development is going to be make or
break for India ’s
demographic dividend to pay off. The southern States will also have to
increasingly deal with the consequences of an ageing population.
While India as a
whole has 8.5% per cent of its population over 60, Tamil Nadu and Kerala have
older populations; nearly 13 per cent of Kerala is over the age of 60, a level
comparable with those of northern European countries.
The vastly different stages
of development that the northern and southern States are at are best
illustrated by their median ages; there is a 10-year difference between the
median ages of U.P. (between 20 and 21) and Kerala (between 30 and 31).
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