Causes of Rapid Population Growth in India

4. Causes of Rapid Population Growth in India

India's population grew rapidly for decades after independence because its birth rate stayed high even as its death rate fell fast — exactly the Stage 2 pattern described in Section 3.

Each half of that gap has its own set of causes.

(A) Causes of the persistently HIGH birth rate:

• Early marriage and universal marriage norms. Marriage at a young age, and the social expectation that virtually everyone marries, extends a woman's total reproductive years and raises the number of children a couple is likely to have.
• Low levels of female literacy and education (historically). Education — especially of women — is one of the strongest, most consistently observed factors reducing family size, because it raises awareness of family planning, delays marriage, and improves women's role in family decisions; where female literacy has lagged, birth rates have tended to stay higher.
• Preference for a large family / son preference. Cultural and social factors, including the desire for a male heir, have historically pushed some families to keep having children until a son is born, raising average family size.
• Children seen as economic assets. In agrarian, low-income households, children have historically been seen as an additional pair of working hands on the farm, and as informal old-age security for parents in the absence of pensions or savings — both of which create an economic incentive for larger families.
• Inadequate access to family planning services, historically more acute in rural and remote areas, limiting couples' practical ability to control family size even where they might wish to.
• Religious and social attitudes in some communities that have discouraged the use of contraception.

(B) Causes of the RAPIDLY DECLINING death rate:

• Advances in medical science and public health, including large-scale vaccination and disease-control programmes, which sharply cut deaths from infectious diseases and epidemics that had historically kept mortality high.
• Control of famines and improved food security, particularly after the Green Revolution raised foodgrain output and reduced the risk of large-scale famine deaths.
• Improved sanitation and drinking-water supply, reducing deaths from water-borne and sanitation-related diseases.
• Expansion of the public health infrastructure — Primary Health Centres, maternal and child healthcare, and a wider network of hospitals — bringing basic medical care within reach …