Causes And Consequences Of Population Growth

There has been continuous debate going on whether Population growth is really a problem or not? If yes, then what are the causes and consequences of it to a developing nations as compared to developed nations. This paper will use India as an example to discuss these issues, as India is the second most populated country of the world after China.

World’s population has increased from 6.6 billion in 2007 to 7.6 billion in just a decade and is expected to exceed 9.2 billion by 2050. This is a significant rise in the population, despite all the measures taken by United Nations, Government (as in China) and different NGO’s to educate people about the consequences of having more children on the health of the mother, on the financial situation of

Fertility rate directly corresponds to high birth rate and unfortunately can not be altered overnight. As a result, high fertility rate now will most likely result in higher population growth in next 2-3 decades. This, is also know as the hidden momentum of population growth, which directly affects the demographic trends of the country. High fertility rate cannot be decreased over night due to the fact that it is not easy to overcome social, economic and political factors which have resulted in such high fertility rates over the centuries. Especially in a developing country like India, where most of its population depends on agricultural output, and as a result have higher number of children in order to avoid hiring extra labor and also to support them when they get older. Beliefs such as these are hard to overcome even in a decade and can only be done by providing proper education to these locals and by supporting them

It differs not only in each country but theres is a different demographic trend in developed countries compared to that in developing countries. Here, we will use Population Pyramids of United States and India in 2016 to explain the differences. The Population Pyramid of India has a large base and narrow top which suggests high birth rate and high mortality rate, which is the problem faced by the most of the developing nations especially in South Asia and is even worse in African Nations. While Population Pyramid of United States has more balanced shape due to high technology and research and development resulting in less mortality rate. This is why, United States’ has more than double percentage of people older than 65( 15.6%) compared to that in India, which is 6.3%.This means it has high old dependency ratio. However, due to several factors discussed above, India has way more percentage of the population below 15, as a result having high child dependency ratio. As the pyramids of both country shows, percentage of economically active population( 15-64 years) of both United States and India are roughly same, 65.6% and 66.34% respectively. As a result total dependency ratio of both countries is approximately equal. These results also suggest that India needs to focus more on providing primary education and United States needs to focus more on medical health facilities and