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Discussions of population devolve into debates about childbearing and ultimately centre on women’s bodies. Modern global discourse emphasises a return to traditional ways of life

Visions of population explosion or implosion seem to provoke strong passions. Three centuries ago, Malthus argued that population growth would outpace the food supply, leading to famine and disease. Today, the focus seems to have shifted to concerns about underpopulation in India and globally. Elon Musk even claims that population collapse poses a much greater risk than global warming.

This is a strange turnaround. In the 1800s, the world population was a billion, and life expectancy was less than 30 years. Despite the population growing to over 8 billion, Malthus’s doomsday predictions have not materialised, and life expectancy now exceeds 70. Are fears of a shrinking workforce equally flimsy? Just as improvements in agriculture and the Green Revolution have continued to feed the world, it seems highly likely that AI and other technological advances will cope with a smaller workforce.

However, the harm to the social fabric from these overblown claims may be incalculable. Discussions of population devolve into debates about childbearing and ultimately centre on women’s bodies. Malthus advocated chastity for women to reduce fertility. Modern global discourse emphasises a return to traditional ways of life, controlling access to contraception, and sometimes criminalises abortion. The Indian discourse echoes the global disconnect, with some unique twists, leaving fear and dissension in its wake. Hence, it is important to address some of these fears directly.

First, is India on the verge of depopulation, as a recent article suggests? If we accept the United Nations projections using their medium variant, the Indian population will grow to 1.7 billion and then decline by the end of the 21st century, returning to the present level of about 1.4 billion. However, projections from the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics (IHME) suggest it will dip below 1 billion. Unfortunately, IHME projections assume that future college graduates will follow the same path to low fertility as current graduates and that increasing education will further reduce fertility. But between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for women with 12 more years of education held steady at 1.7, while that for women with lower levels of education dropped. A narrowing gap between educated and less-educated women has been observed in many countries, undermining confidence in the IHME methodology.

Second, with an ageing population, will India face a worker shortage? Projections from the Population Foundation of India indicate that the share of the population aged 60 and older will rise from 11 per cent to 28 per cent between 2021 and 2051. However, this will be offset by a decline in the child population, and the working-age population will decline only slightly from 66 per cent to 64 per cent. With an AI-led increase in productivity and the potential to recruit women workers who are largely outside the formal labour force, even this slight decline should pose no problem.

Third, is the population in north India growing faster than that in south India, and if so, will it diminish the power of southern states in the Indian Union? South India experienced a fertility decline earlier than the north. For example, in 1971, Tamil Nadu accounted for 7.5 per cent of India’s population; by 2011, it had dropped to 6 per cent, and it is likely to have declined further by 2026. Consequently, if electoral seat allocation is based on population share in 2026 rather than 1971, the southern states will lose. But it is also important to remember that higher economic growth, driven by low population growth and increased investment in children, has increased productivity in states like Tamil Nadu. Sanjeev Sanyal estimates that Tamil Nadu’s share of GDP grew from 7.1 per cent in the 1990s to 8.9 per cent in 2023-24. Balancing economic and demographic power and ensuring adequate representation of geographic minorities is a challenge that will need to be addressed in the coming years.

Fourth, is the Muslim population in India likely to overtake the Hindu population? Muslim fertility is slightly higher than Hindu fertility, but across the three waves of the National Family Health Survey between 2005 and 2021, both communities have seen a similar decline in TFR of about 0.7, leaving the Hindu-Muslim fertility gap unchanged. Rudimentary calculations suggest that even after 50 years, this fertility differential, if unchanged, would result in a small increase in the share of the Muslim population in India from about 15 per cent to 19 per cent. It seems more likely that Muslim fertility will follow a path similar to that of Hindus, and the increase will be smaller.

The above discussion suggests the need for a cautious, balanced approach to adapting to population change and for avoiding aggressive rhetoric that does more harm than good. Consider the discourse on declining fertility, which has led to political calls for a return to traditional values and for deprioritising contraception and child bonuses.

India stands in stark contrast to countries like Japan. Faced with an inflexible gender culture and work-family constraints, nearly 30 per cent of Japanese women remain unmarried into their 30s. In contrast, marriage and family remain the linchpin of Indian family life. The NFHS shows that 97 per cent of women are married by age 30. Yet the very importance of family also leads to smaller families. My research with Alaka Basu shows that parents often choose to have a single child so they can invest more in that child’s education. Reducing educational costs, improving the quality of education, and easing the burden on parents to supervise homework may do more to increase fertility than a call for higher fertility.

The writer is professor, University of Maryland, and NCAER. Views are personal

Schools shift to online teaching during heat waves or pollution. Poor children suffer, as they cannot access instruction.

India’s education policy today rightly emphasises better learning outcomes, equitable and inclusive education, and the human capital required to achieve the country’s developmental goals. But for millions of children, the basic condition that makes all of this possible – uninterrupted schooling- is increasingly becoming a challenge.

This is different from school dropout, which is usually seen as the primary cause of learning disruption. The reasons for dropout are many in India, like poverty or social factors like child marriage and gender roles prioritising boys’ education, leaving girls to perform domestic chores, etc. This is particularly seen at the secondary level, where dropout rates are substantially higher than in primary schooling, and retention remains a challenge despite higher enrolment.

Environmental factors

Added to this is the problem of disruptions in schooling, mostly due to environmental factors, the COVID-19 pandemic being the exception in recent times. In recent years, schools in Delhi and across parts of North India have been repeatedly shut down due to severe air pollution. Across the country, schools face similar interruptions at different times of the year due to heatwaves, dense fog, heavy rainfall, cyclones and floods. On April 19, the Odisha government ordered schools in nine districts to remain shut for a few days from April 20 due to a heatwave warning.

For the current summer, IMD has already warned of severe above-normal heatwave days across several parts of the country during the April-June period. Such weather-induced disruptions show that school closures are no longer just a pandemic-era exception. It is becoming a recurring feature of educational life at a time of growing extreme climate shocks.

The problem is not only about schools being shut, but that the alternative is far from equal. For many children, a shift to online classes is not a smooth substitute for classroom learning, but it is just the beginning of exclusion. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provides important evidence of how school closures widen educational inequalities.

Survey findings

Findings from the latest third round of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-3), conducted in 2022–24, clearly capture this divide. Among children aged 5-15 who were enrolled during the pandemic, 52 per cent of those in private schools were offered online classes during the closure period, compared with only 30 per cent in government schools.

Similarly, 45 per cent of private-school students received educational videos or other online learning material, compared with just 25 per cent of government-school students. Most strikingly, 61 per cent of children in government schools reported that their school shared nothing at all, compared with 43 per cent in private schools. These findings reflect a wider national pattern, with a Ministry of Education report showing that in several large states, between 40 and 70 per cent of school-going children lacked access to digital devices during the pandemic.

Teachers’ accounts from the IHDS-3 survey help explain why this gap was so difficult to bridge. Among Grade 3 teachers, those in government schools were more likely than their private-school counterparts to report barriers such as poor electricity, weak internet access, and lack of devices – constraints that students themselves had to grapple with. They were also more likely to point to limited digital skills among students and parents, as well as home circumstances that hindered learning. Remote education fell short not only due to technological gaps, but also because learning from home was shaped by unequal household circumstances.

Closures do not create a temporary and uniform pause in learning; they produce an unequal shock. Children already studying in less advantaged settings are more likely to lose access to instruction altogether and less likely to recover quickly. Educational disruption, therefore, does not merely interrupt learning in the short term. It can deepen longer-term inequalities in human capital formation.

That is why the challenge goes beyond curriculum, teacher training, and school infrastructure, even though all of these are important. Such discussions often assume that schooling continues without interruption. But when environmental shocks repeatedly push children out of classrooms and into highly unequal home-based learning conditions, the central policy question becomes one of continuity: who can remain connected to learning when the school gates are shut?

E-initiatives

India is not short of digital education initiatives. PM eVIDYA was launched to provide multimodal access to education, while DIKSHA serves as a national platform for digital learning content. Samagra Shiksha has also expanded digital and ICT support within the broader school education framework, and NEP 2020 places clear emphasis on equitable and inclusive education. But the existence of schemes does not by itself guarantee continuity in learning. Where households lack stable connectivity, adequate devices, digital familiarity, or supportive learning environments, the children are unable to benefit from them.

As environmental disruptions become more frequent, measures for continuity in learning can no longer be treated as part of crisis management. They must be built into mainstream education policy through stronger digital access, low-tech alternatives, community-based support, and effective last-mile delivery. Otherwise, every school closure will widen the gap between children who can continue learning and those who cannot, turning such interruptions into inequality.

The writer is an Associate Fellow, NCAER – National Data Innovation Centre. Views expressed are personal.

In a climate where outcome monitoring, scaling up, and sustainability are the main buzzwords, grassroots organisations that speak from the heart are likely to be deprived of resources and public attention

The 21st century saw the emergence of a new philosophy for voluntary organisations. Good intentions were no longer enough, scale and outcome monitoring became the new gold standard. The California consensus, driven by the philanthropic impulses of tech billionaires, impatiently sought rapid societal change rooted in science and technology. This was a departure from the philosophy of institution-building favoured by foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. The traditional idea of selfless service was no longer sufficient; new philanthropists demanded measurable results. Ostensibly, it made sense that recipients of public funding should be held accountable. But what if this search for scale and accountability is ultimately counterproductive?

Microfinance programmes have been praised for high repayment rates in group lending to women by Grameen Bank and BRAC. However, Anne Marie Goetz and Rina Sen Gupta find that pressure on fieldworkers and group members to achieve high repayment rates has led them to selectively choose recipients based on their ability to repay, often excluding the poorest, least educated, and least connected. When outcome measures become the main criteria for judging programmes and institutions, it is not surprising that they lose sight of their original goals and become focused on maximising performance on outcome metrics.

Randomised evaluations, the foundation of rigorous programme assessment, are complex and often methodologically fraught. What happens in one place can influence another. Analysis of the effect of savings groups on income in Uganda and Malawi by Christopher Heitzig and Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan finds that rising incomes in villages that implemented savings groups also impacted nearby villages. As a result, about 23-28 per cent of the programme’s benefits were not captured. Without careful attention to spillover effects, we might wrongly conclude that a programme has failed even when it has succeeded.

A focus on scale introduces other challenges. Transformative social programmes are often bottom-up, emphasising processes that need participation and buy-in from local communities. They may not be easily scaled, and the idea that a programme is only valuable if it can reach hundreds of millions of people might be counterproductive. In their book, John List and colleagues enumerate examples of projects that fail to scale globally. Closer to home, consider Lok Jumbish, a primary education programme in Rajasthan. Lok Jumbish was a highly participatory programme in which the community was mobilised to create a village education plan. It was so successful that the World Bank and the Indian government collaborated to scale up some of these ideas into a larger District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) that eventually covered 272 districts and 18 states as a centrally sponsored scheme.

A comparison of Lok Jumbish and DPEP by Tomako Kobayashi highlights their differences and notes the shallow local participation in Village Education Committees of DPEP compared to the deep, passionate engagement in Lok Jumbish. Evaluation of DPEP by the World Bank shows that while the programme was successful in increasing initial enrolment, it did not achieve its goal of reducing dropout rates or improving learning achievement.

Arguably, the most significant critique of the California consensus — which has now entered the vocabulary of Indian philanthropy and policymaking — is that it has shifted the landscape of civil society activism from passion and commitment to technocracy. In a climate where outcome monitoring, scaling up, and sustainability are the main buzzwords, grassroots organisations that speak from the heart are likely to be deprived of resources and public attention.

India is home to some of the greatest transformative movements — Satyagraha and non-violence, land reform, dairy cooperatives, the Chipko Movement — all rooted in grassroots civic action. Each was a leap of faith, each generated energy that gave rise to a nation of a thousand movements. Let us not allow the space for civic action to shrink in the pursuit of the holy grail of outcome monitoring.

The writer is professor, NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre and University of Maryland. Views are personal