Population and Associated Issues

What the official syllabus says

UPPCS Main Examination, General Studies I.

Role of Women in society and women's organization, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies.

This page covers the part on population and associated issues, their problems and remedies. Settlements and urbanisation are on Population and Settlements.

Topics in detail

Concepts

• Population size, growth, density and distribution
• Fertility, mortality and migration; crude birth and death rates; total fertility rate; replacement level (2.1)
• Demographic transition model and its stages
• Malthus's theory of population and its critics
• Age-sex structure, dependency ratio, population pyramids

India's population

• Census of India: history (first synchronous census 1881) and what it records
• Census 2011: about 121 crore people; decadal growth 17.7%; density 382 per sq km; sex ratio 943; literacy about 73%
• Regional differences in growth and fertility between states
• National Family Health Survey: the fifth round (2019-21) recorded a total fertility rate of 2.0

Associated issues

• Demographic dividend: a young population, jobs and skills
• An ageing population and old-age care
• Sex ratio and child sex ratio
• Pressure on land, water, housing, health and education
• Migration and its effect on source and destination areas
• Population and the environment

World population

• Growth of world population; the most and least populous regions
• Population projections of the United Nations; countries with ageing and shrinking populations
• Distribution: factors that favour dense population (plains, water, climate, jobs) and those that limit it

Health and nutrition

• Infant mortality rate, maternal mortality ratio, life expectancy
• Malnutrition: stunting, wasting, anaemia; the double burden with obesity
• Universal immunisation and the National Health Mission

Policy and remedies

• National family planning programme (1952), among the first in the world
• National Population Policy, 2000: its immediate, medium-term and long-term objectives
• Shift from targets to a rights-based approach to reproductive health; the 1994 Cairo conference (ICPD)
• Women's education and empowerment as the most effective route to lower fertility
• Skilling, health and nutrition to turn numbers into a dividend

Overlaps

Uttar Pradesh's demography and censuses are in General Studies VI.