Barriers to potential demographic dividend

The workforce could easily be skilled to take up manufacturing jobs and in time, they could be skilled to enter higher-value services and R&D

I must have been about 15 when I first heard “Demographic dividend”. It was the height of the Emergency and the accepted wisdom was in favour of population control. There were rumours about forced sterilisation drives in rural UP and Bihar, and the urban middle-class approved.

Our geography teacher was a brave man. In a class about the economic geography of India, he first parroted the slogan of the day, “We two, our two” extolling population control.  Then he drew a deep breath and said, “There’s another way of looking at large populations. I heard this brilliant Harvard economist, Subramanian Swamy,