According to the
live population counter, Worldometer, India’s population is currently at
1,355,853,093…094…095. Equivalent to 17.74% of the entire world population, it
is expected that the population density would squeeze 1,180 people into each
square mile.[1] The second largest
country in the world by population, it is worth discussing the importance of
population in an Indian context, especially considering the burden that an
exponentially growing population plays on the distribution of WASH facilities.
This piece will reflect on population growth - what it is, how it began, why it
is important, and how India can work to combat an exponentially growing
population for the sake of a more sustainable planet.
Family planning
became officially recognized as a human right in Article 16 of the Proclamation
of Teheran, an International Conference on Human Rights held in Teheran, Iran,
in 1968. Article 16 recognizes the right of parents to determine the number and
spacing of their children, to chose when and how often to embrace parenthood
(if at all), and the right of women to avoid depletion, exhaustion, and danger
related to too many pregnancies.[3] The UN Population
Fund and the World Health organization recognizes nine standards to ensuring
family planning is upheld as a human right: family planning must be
non-discriminatory, available, accessible, acceptable, of good quality,
participatory, accountable, involve informed decision making, and practice privacy/confidentiality.[4]
Access to family
planning is a serious concern on a global scale, and India is certainly not exempt.
Currently, only 53.5% of married Indian women (aged 15-49) use family planning
methods, and 12.9% of women specified an unmet need for family planning.[5] The difference in
these statistics shows that not only is family planning specifically
inaccessible for 12.9% of the population, but the remaining 33.6% do not
recognize a personal need for family planning resources at all. Furthermore,
female sterilization is the primary contraceptive being used (75.3%); Lack of
access to a reversible form of contraception could intimidate women from making
the choice to engage in family planning.[6]
And it shows. With
a current population of 1.3 billion people - almost 18% of the global make-up -
India’s population is estimated to surpass China’s by the year 2024.[1] And a growing
population, as we all know, has detrimental effects on the environment, quality
of life and access to resources on a global scale.
Take WASH, for
example - an issue that HEEALS seeks to address in its project implementation.
Ensuring that the massive Indian population has access to proper WASH resources
- clean drinking water, private and accessible toilet facilities, soap for hand
washing, etc. - has proven itself to be a challenge in and of itself. This
becomes multiplied by a growing population, not simply because more people
materialize in need of these resources. But a growing population shifts
demographics, and consequentially, the type of resources needed.
George St J Perrott
and Dorothy F Holland expand on this in their article, Population Trends and
Problems of Public Health: “Alterations in age composition, internal migration
of racial or industrial groups, changes in population density and urban-rural
movement require current adaptation of the health program to solve the new
problems thus created.”[2] A large
population of children under the age of five exacerbates the issue of access to
clean drinking water, as water-bourne diseases is the largest cause of death in
India for children of this age group.[3] A large
population of women of child-bearing age requires a focus on access to proper
menstrual hygiene management resources, so as to avoid RTIs and other
complications. So it is not just the issue of more people on this planet;
Rather, the issue arises in giving an increasing number of people the resources
needed to survive.
Yet, in the lecture
“Why The World Population Won’t Exceed 11 Billion”, statistical analyst Hans
Rosling offers an alternative way to regard population growth, and an
accompanying solution that involves an increased focus on improving the health
and quality of life for youth in developing countries. Rosling passionately
states, “the poorest in Africa… they will not use contraceptives as long as
they see their children dying, as long as there is no school in the village, as
long as they need their children for work.”[4] Here, we see
that the emphasis placed on access to family planning, incredibly important in
and of itself, is not sufficient without ensuring that families will survive in
the poorest of conditions.
So while the Indian
government made its FP2020 commitment at the 2012 London Summit on Family
Planning, an argument could be made for strengthening efforts to reduce
WASH-related diseases - one of the leading causes of infant mortality in India.[5]
-Jayde
Wash Intern Coordinator
[1]
https://www.nhp.gov.in/world-population-day_pg
[2]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690260/
[3]
[3]
http://www.familyplanning2020.org/entities/76
[4]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
[5]
http://www.familyplanning2020.org/entities/76
[1]
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/india-population/
[2]
https://www.nhp.gov.in/world-population-day_pg
[3]
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Education/Training/Compilation/Pages/a)TheProclamationofTeheran(1968).aspx
[4]
https://www.nhp.gov.in/world-population-day_pg
[5]
http://rchiips.org/nfhs/pdf/NFHS4/India.pdf
[6]
http://www.familyplanning2020.org/entities/76
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