India Gender Development And Population Control

925 Words4 Pages
Gender development in India and population control The world population is now a staggering seven billion. India is a big reason why the world’s population is increasing at an extreme rate, so why it is that India’s attempts to effectively stop their population growth have failed thus far? There are many arguably reasons for the failure; I believe the main reason for their lack of success is because of India’s failed gender development plan. To be more specifically, India lack of female development is the root cause for their continued population growth. If India is to achieve an effective population control for their country and the world, they need to focus on improving their ranks within the gender-related development index (GDI) and the gender empowerment measure (GEM). If and when India does decide to focus much of their efforts to improving their GDI and GEM scores, their population growth will stabilize. In 2011 UNDP’s gender inequality index ranked India as 129th out of 187 countries. It would be a huge mistake to not correlate some of these statistics to the increasing population. In 2011 only 32.8 percent of females were part of the labour force, while 81.1 percent of males were part of the labour force. The other obvious statistic was that India has an 86.3 percent adolescent fertility rate. It is clear that the only way to lower these numbers and control the population is to educate the women. The education of women will lead to the higher labour force participation percentage, lower adolescent fertility rates because women are waiting longer, which will lead to a higher ranking of the GDI. Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea lowered their fertility and birth rates because of their compulsory education for girls. Not only did this lower the population growth figures, it also upgraded the quality of the work force from the
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