New Delhi [India], August 19 (ANI): States such as Keralam, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, where birth rates have fallen well below the replacement level, will have no choice but to bring in migrants from other parts of the country to keep their economies and public systems functioning, said Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister on Wednesday.
In an interview with ANI, Sanyal highlighted India’s changing population trends, stating that while the country’s overall numbers look stable for now, this is largely because of high-birth-rate states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar balancing out the low-birth-rate ones.
“While on the whole, this overall number looks okay, that’s happening because of UP, Bihar, etc but there are parts of the country like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and, interestingly, Bengal, where birth rates are very far below the replacement rate. In these states, they will have to accept migrants from other parts of the country in order to keep the system going,” Sanyal said, adding that such change will lead to conversation about cultural continuity and more.
He said states cannot have it both ways by sending large numbers of their own people abroad for work while also expecting to run their local economy with too few workers left behind.
“You cannot have very low birth rates and send off a large proportion of your population to work in the Gulf and then say the systems have to be kept running at the same time. Who’s going to keep those systems running? So you have to either shut those systems down and accept a lower level of functioning,” he said.
Sanyal noted that India as a whole is not yet facing the problem of a shrinking population, and is instead entering a phase where a large share of its people will be of working age.
“We don’t have that problem yet, but we will. Also, do remember, we will one day maybe have it, but right now our problem is that our population is already beginning to reach. We are now entering into the sort of demographic dividend phase where a bulk of our population will be of working age, and we will be here for 20, 35, 30 years, about 30 years. This is a good phase for us where our problem will be job creation, not this problem of shrinking population. But we do need to remember that this problem will come to us as well,” he said.
Sanyal asserted that no country in the world has managed to reverse a birth rate that has fallen significantly below the replacement level, despite various government incentives to encourage childbirth. He highlighted that while some countries have turned to immigration to keep their institutions running, others like Japan have deliberately “limited migration”, choosing to prioritise cultural continuity even with population decline.
He cited South Korea as an extreme example, where the total fertility rate needed to keep a developed country’s population stable is around 2.1, but South Korea’s rate has fallen to about a third of that figure.
“Their total fertility rate is now at 0.7, which is one-third of the required rate. Now, if you keep that going for any length of time, you will reach a position where you will essentially have to begin to shut down your universities,” he said.
He also pointed to China, which he said would face a sharp population decline in the coming decades. “This is something that China will face in the not-too-distant future,” he said. (ANI)
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