Determinants of Population Change in India – UGC NET – Notes

• Population change in India refers to the variation in the size, composition, and distribution of the population over time. This change is governed by a set of demographic, social, economic, cultural, and political factors that operate simultaneously.
• In India, population change has historically been shaped by high fertility and declining mortality, followed by gradual demographic transition influenced by development, public health interventions, and social transformation.
• Three major factors that determine the change in population of any country viz. Fertility, Mortality and Migration. Of these, migration is not a major determinant of population change in Indian context.

Fertility

Concept of Fertility

• ‘Fertility’ in demography refers to the actual birth performance of a group of women or to the relative frequency with which the births occur in total population or in the population exposed to it. The growth of the population of the world largely depends on human fertility. Any society replenishes itself through the process of human fertility.
• Thus, in population dynamics, fertility is a positive force through which the population expands, counteracting the force of attrition caused by mortality. If this replacement of human numbers is not adequate, that is, if the number of deaths in a particulars society continues to be more than that of births, that society would face the danger of becoming extinct. On the other hand, excessive replacement of human number can also create several social and political problems for a country.
• Fertility is, in fact, a result of ‘fecundity. Fecundity is the physiological capacity to reproduce. Obviously, it is not possible to measure exactly the real capacity of women to produce off-springs; it can only be guessed/observed with the help of the maximum levels of fertility ever observed in a non-contraceptive population. 
• It is important to differentiate between fecundity and fertility. ‘Fecundity’ refers to “the capacity of a man, a woman or a couple to participate in reproduction, i.e. the capacity to produce a live child or children’. Fertility, on the other hand, “refers to the actual reproductive performance whether of an individual or a couple or a group”. While there is no direct measurement for fecundity, fertility can be studied from the statistics of births.

Let us look at some useful terms that have relevance in the context of study of fertility:

• Sterility: While a man or woman or a couple who has given birth to at least one live child, is considered fertile, one who has not had a single child is considered sterile. While fertility promotes continuation of human race, sterility hinders population growth and gradually leads to its extinction.
• Birth Order: The sequence of live births of a women are classified according to their order or rank; e.g. first order birth (i.e. first in order), second order birth, (i.e. second in order), etc.
• Parity: Women may be classified according to the number of children born alive to them. For instance, the first parity women are those who have given birth to one child; the second parity women are those who have given birth to two children; and so on. Thus, while the birth order refers to the child, parity refers to the mother.
• Natural fertility: As defined by Henry (1953 in Asha and Tara, 2006, p.253), the French demographer, natural fertility is “fertility of a human population that makes no deliberate effort to limit births.” Fertility may be considered to be natural if no contraception or induced abortion is used. Practice such as prolonged breastfeeding and/or abstinence after childbirth do tend to lower fertility, but when such practices are adopted without any intention of controlling fertility, the results of fertility is considered as natural.
• Contraception: Contraception refers to measures which are taken in order to prevent sexual intercourse or coitus from resulting in conception. A contraceptive method is sometimes termed as a birth control method, though “birth control” is used in a broader sense to include intentional abortions, sterilization and complete abstinence from coitus.