Whither Demographic Dividend

India's relatively benign and voluntary family planning approach is lauded for its expected demographic dividend, when the nation is relatively young with an average age around 25 and almost half the population below the age of 25. At first glance, this is a major advantage as other nations age, India's young work force will be welcomed and even required across the world and pension funds across the world will have to invest in a growing market like India which will lead to an economic boom. At least this is what Nandan Nilekani and most India- optimists and members of emerging India bandwagon are talking about. There are a few minor issues for this vision-

1) Firstly, the symbolic aspect- the youngest nation in the world has an 80 year old PM whose glory days came almost 20 years ago. The council of ministers is relatively younger at around 64 years of age (a). This statistic is brushed by bringing up the names of Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot or Murli Deora. Agatha Sangma was also in the list, but where have I heard these names before? Oh yes, they are second generation immigrants in Parliament. So this is the message we get- you are either THE old guard itself or you can succeed someone in the old guard.

2) We talk about demographic dividend, but apart from a plethora of schemes or ideas on Public Private Partnership and a lot of empty rhetoric on skill development, nothing has been done on this. One can talk of 17 new IITS, NITs in every state and over 10 IIMs, but they are struggling to find faculty and quality of academic work happening there is questionable. Credit should be given where due, IIST, IISER are doing a decent job, I hope they can increase scientific research in the country. There is little being done for Post Graduate courses, research and little to integrate industry and education and research. Vocation skills are seen as an inferior choice and so is learning by doing. Even primary education is a mess as report after report indicate pathetic learning outcomes and widespread teacher absenteeism in schools.

3) Major effort at labour reform is related to bringing down regulations and protection, which is fine since trade unions and employees unions focus only protecting permanent employees which has lead to the informalisation of formal sector where contract labourers outnumber permanent workers. Even the state is doing the same through recruiting and paying less than minimum wages for ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) and Anganwadi workers, Mid-day Meal cooks and even school teachers. This is where the reforms must happen by restricting the number of people who can be employed as contract labour and when employed for more than a specified period of time, making them permanent employees mandatory. The purpose of contract labour is to overcome short- term labour crunch and training, not to replace permanent employees. Even trade unions are in the clutches of permanent employees.

4) Demographic dividend will not come on the back of an empty stomach and a disease ravaged body. Infant and child mortality, low immunisation, undernutrition and almost non-existent health facilities in the government sector are not being addressed at the higher levels.

5) We will not have a young forever population and so no one is talking about what happens when this population gets old. In all probability, we will get old before we get rich.

Add to this disadvantages of caste and gender to which our political parties have no response except blaming each other or pandering to caste panchayats that restrict rights of women.

It is NGOs, citizen's groups and some committed government employees that are fighting the battle against these, not the political class or upper bureaucracy. We have enough and more economic and social experts, Amartya Sen, Aruna Roy and thousands of others are working on this field. It is time we listened to them rather than the blatantly open but stupid propaganda of religious leaders (leaders of all religious factions, I can't accept them as leaders of religion) who are not focused on demographic dividend but on demographic division where they exhort us to raise more children either to address population imbalance or to see everyone as children of god while resisting contraception and family planning.