The declining population

While we attribute all sorts of problems in India to the huge population the country has, it is also important to consider what will be happening with the people for whom population is declining. The effects of the decline are already visible in the educated class and I think it is high time one remains aware of them. Looking at my own family history gives enough micro-level data. At my great grandfather’s time, an average couple was producing about 8 children. My grandfather had 4 children. These children had an average 1.5 children per couple. For my generation this number has come to 0.66. As education levels are going up and comparative economic advantages of having few children are realised, couples are giving birth to fewer children.
 
China has forcefully implemented One Child Policy while Indian government was just doing advertisements appealing people to restricting to only two children per family. The population burden in China has come down and at the same time they have started facing some problems. Similar challenges are being faced by our Indian educated upper and middle classes who voluntarily opted for One Child Policy. Due to our close knit and extended family systems, we have been safeguarded till date but I think not anymore. Here are some upcoming questions and possibilities we would have to consider at micro-level,
• Our children will be responsible for taking care of more people than their own parents. With changes in the family patterns and attitudes, how inclined these kids and their partners would be to take care of even their parents would be one more question to understand. With governmental care like the one in developed countries almost nonexistent, this becomes highly important.
• Our children would get more resources than we did. That would also include very high inheritance benefits. Will that make them lazy or least interested in advancing their careers?
• With few people left to take care of us in older age, onus of keeping fit will remain on ourselves and no more blaming to our family members for not paying attention to our poor conditions like the way we have always heard in the extended family networks before.
• There are possible ill effects on the mental health due to lack of supportive family systems.
• With rise in the life expectancy and reduced dependence on the family, we shall have to keep working and might have to forget the complete retirement from work as most of our parents had.

Another looming problem for children of our so called educated societies is skewed gender ratio. Desire to have to have at least one boy in the family and also restricting the size of the family seems to have lead to a huge imbalance in the gender ratio. Even if families have not gone for selective abortions like those happened in many districts in India, mere stopping after having first boy child and not extending the number is going to lead to a crisis. Just to check whether my statement gets supported by the data, I took a count of 46 couples whom I know, are from our locality, in their 30’s and 40’s, at least one parent has a bacheolar’s degree and have at least one child born to them. For 46 couples, there were 68 children out of which 30 were girls and 38 were boys. Out of these 46 couples, 16 had only 1 boy each. Now when these children will grow up to the age of marriage, roughly 25% of these boys won’t be able to get a girl from the locality and we have not assessed the situation in other areas. So much for a society that claims to be more rich and educated!
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