Demographers are celebrating the dawn of a new era in Uttar Pradesh and so are those who agonise over every child birth in states such as Bihar and Rajasthan, which are low on key human development indicators like health and education.
According to the provisional data of Census 2011, Uttar Pradesh recorded the biggest decline in the absolute number of children, followed by Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Kerala.
This is unique, as Uttar Pradesh was earlier clubbed with 17 other Empowered Action Group (EAG) states for having a high population growth rate. EAG called for focused attention on health and population in these states, mainly population, under the National Population policy of 2000.
At the other end of the spectrum are Bihar, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Meghalaya and Chhattisgarh, where the highest increase in child population in the age group of 0-6 years occurred.
Does this call for celebration or concern?
These trends of decline in population growth should be seen with the fact that infant mortality is the highest in Uttar Pradesh (73 per 1,000 births), as opposed to the national rate of 57; and the lowest rate of 15 in Kerala and Goa. In under-five years mortality, Uttar Pradesh also has the highest rate (96 deaths per 1,000 children), while the lowest is 16 in Kerala whose company Uttar Pradesh seeks to keep in terms of declining population growth.
High levels of infant and child mortality are found in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh in the central region, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in the north-eastern region, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Bihar in the eastern region, and Rajasthan in the northern region. In most of these states, especially Bihar, the decadal growth rate has been robust — not showing the abrupt slide which Uttar Pradesh shows. The population growth in Uttar Pradesh declined from 25.85 per cent to 20.09 per cent, while the decline in Bihar was to 25.07 per cent from 28.62 per cent.
More From This Section
In Bihar, as in Uttar Pradesh, there has been no dramatic change in circumstances that could explain the birth of a lower number of children in one and the steady growth in the other.
In both these states, marriage occurs at a low age, there is high incidence of high child mortality, and both have been making attempts at providing access to birth control options, mainly sterilisation. In Uttar Pradesh perhaps, the targeted approach followed by the state government to sterilise women has borne fruit over the last decade. But focus on birth control, without any slowing of child mortality, could prove a deadly cocktail.
According to Arun Gupta, regional coordinator of the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India, the decline in the decadal growth rate of UP would mean little if the state is not able to scale up by several times the rate of decline in child and infant mortality. According to him, the annual rate of decline should go up rapidly. It was 72.7 in 2000 and 73 five years later is hardly an achievement. That 60 per cent of deaths in infants are avoidable if basic hygiene is kept, makes the task achievable, and the failure all the more frustrating.