Birds, bees and the big question

In the Indian education system, sex education isn't the only subject with gaps. Far too many Indians are functionally illiterate, and far too many drop out during middle school

When schools in Bengaluru inspected students’ bags for cellphones, they discovered many Class X students also carried contraceptive pills and condoms. This suggests remarkable good sense on their part. Yes, underage sex is illegal. But if minors are going to indulge in sex, it’s better by far that it’s safe sex. 

Social studies from other parts of the world indicate teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are higher where sex education isn’t a part of the syllabus. Sex education isn’t mandatory in India, and most schools avoid putting it on the curriculum. Most Indian parents would sooner run a marathon than explain the birds and bees to their children.

Those kids must have taught themselves, probably via the internet. It is also heartening that they have easy affordable access to contraception. Until the era of Liberalisation, most Indians only had access to Nirodh — a desi condom with a terrible look and feel. 

In Bengal and Assam, the upper middle-class used smuggled Bangladeshi condoms made by a Dutch company using Indonesian rubber. One differentiator between an upmarket Mumbai brothel circa 1990 and the run-of-the-mill places was the availability of expensive First World condoms.

Those Bengaluru children are part of India’s so-called demographic dividend (DD) and it’s sad they have had to educate themselves where sex is concerned. The DD is a fancy phrase for a large bulge in the young and working age population. Around 25 per cent of Indians are under 15, and 65 per cent are aged between 15 and 65. If a large chunk of the population is working-age, high growth is possible even without gains in per capita productivity. This presupposes there is gainful employment, and also that the workforce is sufficiently educated to be deployed.

Globally, the DD has played a role in every period of sustained growth. Examples include China, Japan, West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and earlier, the US from the late 19th century onwards. In practice, such periods have also been associated with per capita gains, due to innovations arising from smart young populations. 

However, in and of itself, the DD doesn’t guarantee high growth. There must be sufficient employment opportunities and the population must be sufficiently educated. Unfortunately, sex education isn’t the only area with gaps in the Indian education system. Far too many Indians are functionally illiterate, and far too many, especially girls, drop out during middle school. India has never created sufficient employment opportunities to absorb the DD and generate the sustained high-growth that could have been possible.

Widespread unemployment and under-employment, and people, (especially women), leaving the workforce have been common Indian themes for decades. Big-bang policies like demonetisation, a poorly designed goods and services tax system, and badly implemented lockdowns made things worse. But employment generation has always been poor.

There is a flip side to the DD. As populations move up the income and education ladder, birth rates drop. The working population shrinks while pensioners (who live longer due to improved healthcare) bulge. This transition is even worse if gender ratios are skewed. With fewer women of child-bearing age, even fewer babies are born.

The EU and Japan are going through a pensioner bulge and it’s led to a near-stagnation of growth in many First World countries. China with its poor gender ratios and one-child policy may see its population dropping 35 per cent in the next 20 years, and it will have to cope with a large pensioner population. The US has so far avoided this dire fate, only via immigration.

India’s total fertility rate (the number of children the average woman has) is below replacement rate in many states, which means falling populations. Those states are the ones with higher per capita, better education and better healthcare. For India as a whole, population growth rates have also declined.

The DD will inevitably evaporate as more people age out of the workforce. The poor gender ratios might make this worse. Unfortunately, politicians who think in five-year electoral cycles aren’t interested in making the long-term investments in education that could change this trajectory. The failure to exploit the Demographic Dividend will haunt us, when it ceases to exist.