If the growing proportion of young population can be supported with adequate resources and they have an encouraging atmosphere, they can exploit opportunities opening in the industrially advanced but aging economies as well as in new sectors in the national economy. In some smaller countries, (particularly in several of the gulf countries) sending and receiving large number of migrants every year, the demographic window may open and close several times. One has to study the cycles of opening and closing of the demographic window and its impact on population and economy.
All developed countries are facing the problem of couples not having enough motivation to produce a baby. This is a very dangerous situation and in the future this may happen in India also.
We have to understand complex and symmetrical linkages between social structure and demographic factors at national, regional, village, household and individual levels. For example, a large number of couples in different parts of the country do not want a girl child. Social structure and difficulties associated with raising a girl child, protecting her honour, and arranging for her marriage are discouraging parents from producing a female child (Desai, 1994). There has been a worrisome decline in the sex ratio in the age group 0-6 in the decade 1991-2001. This is the result of the combination of modern technology and tradition of patriarchy. Affordable technical means to detect the sex of the baby during pregnancy and facilities to abort it and weaknesses in law enforcing agencies are as much responsible for this as tradition. Ironically, some of the regions where sex selective abortions are more prevalent are socio-economically and educationally the most developed regions of the country. The combination of sex preference, medical technology and economic development poses a very serious threat to social development and an effective strategy has to be developed to counter this pattern. In turn, declining child sex ratios are not going to remain inconsequential. They will have a deterministic impact on several institutions of society in the short and long run. There is a need to conduct studies of declining child sex ratios on marriage and kinship, religion and political institutions. |
