Demography

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The statistical study of populations, their size, structure and change. The organising framework is the demographic transition, running from high birth and death rates, through a phase in which death rates fall first and population grows rapidly, to low rates at both ends, and India's position in the later stages is what produces the demographic dividend, a temporary period when the working-age share is high and the dependency ratio low. Three qualifications distinguish a considered answer. The dividend is a window rather than an outcome, converting into growth only if entrants to the workforce are educated, healthy and employed, failing which the same bulge becomes a burden. It is regionally uneven, since the southern and western states have largely completed the transition while several northern states have not, which is why a single national figure misleads and why delimitation on population is politically fraught. And the window closes, since below-replacement fertility eventually produces ageing.