Dr Richa Sharma
While we talk of IVF and other ART techniques on one hand but the trends globally speaks of the other end so where are we heading now?
If globally we see, we are now in the middle of perhaps the greatest demographic change in recorded history. China’s population has stopped growing, and is about to shrink quickly.
The fertility rate of half the world is below replacement level.
On October 31, 2011, the United Nations held a magnificantmedia event at its New York headquarters, to mark the occasion of the world’s population passing seven billion.
What’s population growth ?
Population growth is the change in a population over time, and can be quantified as the change in the number of individuals of any species in a population using “per unit time” for measurement. In biology, the term population growth is likely to refer to any known organism, but this article deals mostly with the application of the term to human populations in demography.
In demography, population growth is used informally for the more specific term population growth rate (see below), and is often used to refer specifically to the growth of the human population of the world.
The world population grew from 1 billion to 7 billion from 1800 to 2011. During the year 2011, according to estimates, 135 million people were born and 57 million died, for an increase in population of 78 million.
Biology and the scriptures urged us to be fruitful and to multiply. Now, quite suddenly in relative terms, half the people of the world have decided not to multiply.
This is not to say population has peaked. Half the world is still reproducing at more than replacement rate, and there is a lag of about 30 years, or one generation, between the time that fertility falls and the time population does.
Birth rates across most of the world are falling far more quickly than predicted even a few years ago.
The way things are going, it’s entirely possible that in little more than a generation world population will stop growing, and that our children will live to see a planet with many millions, maybe a billion, fewer people on it than there are now.
Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%. The CIA World Factbook gives the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate as 1.915%, 0.812%, and 1.092% respectively.
The actual annual growth in the number of humans fell from its peak of 88.0 million in 1989, to a low of 73.9 million in 2003, after which it rose again to 75.2 million in 2006. Since then, annual growth has declined. In 2009, the human population increased by 74.6 million, which is projected to fall steadily to about 41 million per annum in 2050, at which time the population will have increased to about 9.2 billion
Half the population of the world now lives in countries where those of childbearing age are having fewer than two children on average. The fertility rate of half the world is below replacement level.
The reason there are many differing estimates is that there are so many variables involved in predicting population – not just birth rates but death rates, life expectancy and migration, and small variations in the assumptions used in the various models compound into large differences over time.
But the trend evidence is the same everywhere; fertility rates are coming down, and falling much faster than generally predicted only a few years ago.
If we talk of India-India’s geographical birthrate disparities, coupled with the country’s admirable ability to collect socio-economic data, allow us to carefully examine ideas about fertility decline.
The total fertility rate has gone down to 1.8 per cent from 2.2 per cent over the past decade. Social experts say more and more people are opting for nuclear families and postponing the birth of children. They say the city is adopting a character similar to New York. “Young couples in the city are postponing marital bonds.
Falling fertility rates, shrinking family sizes pull down metro cities like Delhi population growth to 21 per cent.
(The author is IVF Consultant Bournhall,New Delhi.)
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