It
gives me great pleasure to be here with you as the Chief Guest at the 55th
Convocation of this prestigious Institute which I had the unique opportunity to
serve from 1978 to 1992 as its Director and Senior Professor. I thank Prof.
Faujdar Ram the present Director and Senior Professor and Prof. Ladu Singh to
have invited me to be the Chief Guest on this occasion and deliver the
Convocation address. I thank Shri A.H.Khan Choudhury, Hon’ble Minister of State
for Health and Family Welfare, Government of India to have found time to be
present here, preside over this function and distribute the degrees and certificates
to the successful candidates. I congratulate the students who have successfully
passed out of this Institute this year and wish them all success in their
professional and personal life. Special mention
should be made of those who have won medals for their outstanding performance.
As
IIPS alumni, you have joined a net work of almost 2500 members distributed
world- wide and occupying key positions in their countries and organizations. You
have joined an elite group of intellectuals. Jocularly we call them IIPS mafia!
Just as an illustration, I can tell you that Dr. Jiang Zhenghua from Peoples
Republic of China, who was my student at IIPS 1981-83, for the Certificate
Course, under a UN fellowship program, later
became a Minister and Chief of State Family Planning Commission in China in the
‘eighties and early ‘nineties, at a time
when they formulated the one child policy and launched successful programs to
achieve their goals. There are many more well known scholars in the population
field and administrators in the population arena working in developed and many
developing countries who had their training in demography/population studies in
IIPS.
Personally, I have been in the population
field for over five decades and I have witnessed the rise of India’ population three times from
around 420 million in 1959 ( when I first took a job as a Statistician in Pilot
Health Project in Gandhigram in Tamil Nadu) to 1210 million in 2011 census. I
am not responsible for this rise, though myself and a devoted group worked hard
to control the rise! Family planning and fertility regulation was the
preoccupying demographic endeavors supported by the governments at the state
and national level in those times and we were all a part to it. The ecstasies and agonies we faced in aligning
ourselves to making the Indian Family Planning Programs successful and
effective is a story that I would share with you some other day. There were
more agonies than ecstasies when census after census from 1961 to 2001 revealed
that population of India continued to grow at unacceptable levels, though with
varying rates in different states, in spite of large sums of money, men and
other technical and demographic resources invested in these programs. Only in
the 2011 census, the absolute number added during 2001-2011 was marginally less than in the earlier
decade. However, still what we have added during 2001-2011, was 181.1 million,
which is the combined population of France ,
United Kingdom , and Italy .
Many developing countries that started their national programs of family
planning much later than India, taking the signals from the Indian program,
such as Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, Thailand and Singapore, achieved much faster
declines in fertility and have already realized replacement levels of
fertility. We are yet to achieve it at the national level. That is really
agonizing. We can talk and discuss about these topics at a later date but for
to-day I would like to talk about the topic that should interest the young outgoing
demographers sitting here, on changing perspectives of demography and roles of
demographers.
Demography,
as you all know, is relatively a new and evolving discipline, compared to other
major established disciplines, such as economics, sociology, statistics, with
which it has developed more or less as an appendage. The word itself was coined
only in 1855 by a Belgian
statistician Achille Guillard and was used in the article entitled 'Elements
de statistique humaine, ou
demographique comparee' (Elements
of human statistics or comparative
demography) (Shryock and Siegel, 1971). Like all other disciplines, as it is defined now ‘demography’ admits of a
narrow and a wider definition. In
narrow terms, demography is defined in the Multilingual Demographic
Dictionary brought out by the International Union for the Scientific Study
of Population ( IUSSP) as “the
scientific study of human populations, primarily with respect to their size, structure and development; it takes into
account the quantitative aspects of their general characteristics” (Van de Walle, IUSSP, 1982). Thus, it is a scientific
study of human populations in their aggregate with regard to their size, composition or structure, spatial distributions and
developments or changes in these over
time. In its wider definition, when it
is also called Population Studies, it not only deals with levels and changes in the size, composition and
distribution of the population but
also with the causes and consequences of the levels and changes. It seeks to answer the questions of “why” and “so
what” than just describe the phenomena. In this wider perspective, demography overlaps with a number of other disciplines such
as economics, sociology, social
psychology, law, political science and reproductive
physiology (Bogue, 1969; UN, 1958). Thus demography, in its wider
definition as population studies, is multi-disciplinary
in nature and in recent years has attracted scholars from various other disciplines especially economics and sociology who have made valuable contributions to
its development, but is still a part of social science. The social scientists are primarily associated
with their parent discipline but interested in the population phenomena.
Demography is still considered a part of
social sciences. Most of the fundamental works contributed to
the field of demography are by scholars from other disciplines who have
accidentally wandered into this field of study of human numbers, its growth,
distribution and characteristics. The hard core of demography, viz the basic
demographic techniques, such as analysis
of age structures, life table construction, standardization, fertility analysis
have all been developed by statisticians,
economists and sociologists and is a small part of population studies. Formal
demography or technical demography, as the core of demography - the techniques that are the
armamentaria of a trained demographer - can be taught rather easily for
students of other disciplines in a one or two semester course on demographic
techniques. It is a very narrow field,
though the techniques have wider applications in other fields.
As you all know this
institute itself was started in 1956 as
a joint effort of the United Nations, Government of India, and Sir Dorabji Tata
Trust to train scholars in the field of
demography, to study the population size, trends, distribution, demographic
processes, causes and consequences of population size and growth in their own countries after their training. It
was named as Demographic Training and Research Center (DTRC), Bombay and was
one of the four regional institutes started in the late ’50s and early ‘60s by the United Nations to train persons to work on the demography of
developing countries. The other centers were Cairo ,
Accra (Ghana ),
Santiago (Chile ). DTRC, Bombay was responsible for training persons
from countries of ECAFE region ( presently called ESCAP ). We ran one year
certificate and two year diploma courses in demography for over three decades
and we have trained more than 2000 scholars from different countries of the
region. The teaching in these two courses, research and applications focused on
quantitative demographic techniques in the estimation of fertility,
mortality, migration, population projections and assessment of quality of
population data. In the pre computer era this was an arduous task. For example
the construction of a life table from a
given set of age specific death rates, using calculators, took half a day’s
work even in the 1970s and 1980s. The development of computer technology,
especially the desk top and personal computers and the package program that
have been developed to analyze demographic data
have reduced the time in the analysis of large scale population data
dramatically, and nowadays with the input of age specific death rates and some
assumptions, the life table can be printed out in a few minutes. Time spent on
quantitative analysis of data has come down significantly. There is no need to
spend as much time as one did in the past in the teaching of demographic
techniques and even persons without quantitative backgrounds can be initiated
to use the various soft ware programs such as PAS, Mortpak, and Spectrum being used in demographic analyses.
Since
the mid-1960s this emphasis on teaching the ‘techniques’ was reduced and
greater emphasis was given to analysis of population survey data, with the data
available from the Bombay Migration Study conducted in the early 1960s and the Mysore Population Study conducted in
the 1950s, and various other surveys. Studies on “substantive demography,” i.e. studies on trends and differentials in
fertility, mortality and migration with focus on fertility began to emerge.
Taking this shift in emphasis into consideration, the DTRC was renamed as
International Institute for Population Studies by the then Director, Dr. S. N.
Agarwala. With this name IIPS continued for quite some time until in 1985 when it was made a “Deemed University ”
with the name reregistered as “
International Institute for Population Sciences”. I joined the institute in
June 1978 and soon after wards I initiated steps to convert the Institute into
a separate University, “ Deemed
University ” under Section
3 of UGC Act. The efforts I took in convincing and battling my own bosses in
the Ministry Of Health and Family Welfare are a legion and a book can be
written on it. After seven long years of struggle with UGC, Ministry of Human
Resource Development and Ministry of Health and Family welfare it was declared
as a Deemed University on August 14, 1985. My joy as well as well of the others
at the Institute, faculty, teachers and students knew no bounds, though in the
same year I suffered a personal calamity.
The reason why I am
sharing some personal memories on the Institute is that when we were checking
and discussing on various names for the Institute we decided on International
Institute for Population Sciences rather than on Studies because we felt the
term ‘studies’ has a connotation of a project or ‘a time bound operation rather
than an enduring scientific appeal of ‘sciences’. Looking back on this decision,
I feel now, with a hind sight of over 28
years, that the decision was right and we should capitalize and work on it.
In 1990 as a part of its policy on
liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy ,the Government of India
also gave permission to launch the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) on
lines similar to the Demographic Health Surveys conducted by the USAID in
different countries of the world and place in public access the data collected
in the survey. Before 1990, no data collected from any surveys in India can leave the Indian shores or be given access to institutions outside India
without permission from the home ministry. There was a strict restriction on
primary data on India
leaving the country. This was a part of “command and control” economy. With
liberalization of the economy, international access to data was also liberalized. NFHS-1
conducted during 1992-93 was the first large scale survey conducted in all the states in India with international
cooperation and support and the data collected from the survey has been analyzed
in great detail by Indian and foreign scholars and reported and quoted widely.
The health, economic and demographic conditions of the Indian people were known
in detail to the outside world. I was privileged to be the first Director of
IIPS to get the necessary approval for the survey, design the same and launch
the field work in 1992. This survey was the precursor of a series of national
level surveys on health and population parameters: NFHS-2 (1998-99), NFHS-3 (2005-6)
and the various rounds of District Level House hold Surveys and the Annual
health Surveys. There was literally an explosion of large scale surveys since
1992 and it is still continuing.
For doing analysis of
such large scale data available from surveys, the course content at IIPS was
suitably modified to include methods of application of commonly used soft ware programs such as
SPSS, STATA, and SAS. Training in the use of these soft ware
packages can be done in two to three weeks time.
Since 1994 after the International Conference on
Population and Development organized by the United Nations at Cairo , the scope of demography or population
studies has been extended to realms that were not thought of earlier. The
topics of “Reproductive and Child Health” ( RCH), “Gender Equity”, “HIV/AIDs,”
“Women’s Rights” are now considered
legitimate areas of study in demography and population studies. Demography has
ceased to be a narrow discipline of social sciences limited to fast and efficient crunching of large volume of population data that is
pouring forth from periodical censuses across the world and various large scale
surveys carried out at regular intervals of time in India and other countries.
In this context of changing global scenario
of globalization of the market economy, global monitoring of human development
through (HDI) and other indices, and especially in the context of global
warming portending a global threat to human survival, what is the scope of
‘demography” and that of a “demographer”. This is a question each one of us
should ask ourselves and come to a common agreement. That will help to
reorganize the course content and methods of teaching of the various courses in
population studies not only at IIPS but globally in other institutions.
Let me share my
thoughts on these matters with you.
1)
Demography or in its
wider definition as Population Studies is no longer just a branch of “Social
Sciences” but also of “Management Sciences” and “Basic “Sciences”. It is not
only a study of ‘fertility”, “mortality”, “migration” and “age distributions”
of populations, their causes and consequences but also of their proximate determinants.
All the proximate determinants of each
of the demographic processes can be broadly categorized into three groups:
biological, environmental and societal. We have been largely concentrating in
population studies so far only on the societal part and almost ignored the
biological and environmental factors. For example, there is growing evidence that sperm counts among
young men are falling rapidly because of environmental pollution and life style
diseases. Primary sterility is on the increase and so is secondary sterility
due to poor reproductive health in developing countries. When an important proximate determinant of fertility is “sperm
count,” can a demographer ignore studying its causes and consequences, in collaboration
with an andrologist or reproductive biologist? Demography is to overlap with
biological and environmental sciences. Many other illustrations can be given on
the potential possibilities of a rise in mortality rates due to environmental
and other factors. Recently an excellent article has appeared in the “Lancet” analyzing
the extent to which the organization and implementation of public health
programs have contributed to rapid
declines in the maternal mortality ratios and infant mortality rates during the
past two decades in Tamil Nadu. Can a demographer isolate himself from such studies? Demography in its wider
definition has to include appreciation and understanding of related biological
and organizational sciences. Population Studies should become Population
Sciences.
2)
The future demographer
should be a part of a team of scientists to work on current life threatening
issues facing populations at large, such as global warming and its effects on
demographic processes, transfer of funds across generations, effects of
environmental pollution on morbidity and mortality, organizational issues
connected with various public health programs,
etc.
3)
There is an imperative
need to make changes in the academic degree structures widening the topics
taught in various courses at IIPS to include reproductive biology,
organizational behavior and making the degree in Population Sciences rather than
in “Population Studies.”
4)
The problem of optimum
population that the planet can take and sustainably endure is once gain raising
its ugly head in the context of rapid dwindling of non renewable resources,
global warming, deforestation and the media informing everyone in the
developing world what the life style of
a person the developed world can be. What can be the population of India ,
if the average Indian has the standard or quality of life of a Korean, Japanese,
British or American. Obviously India
can sustain less people with the standard of living of a person in the US compared to the standard of living of a
person in Korea .
This may require that globally, population can and need to have negative growth
in the future for some countries, with the fertility levels continuing to fall
well below replacement levels, if they aspire for a higher standard of living.
When the Chinese planned their one child family policy, they projected that
their population size may eventually go down with a negative growth and even
come down to 800 million before it reaches the ZPG or zero population growth. I
personally feel that with the available resources it is difficult for India with a population of 1.2 billion to have
the same standard of living even of that in Korea . I may be wrong and I hope I am proved wrong.
5) The environmental restraint on human population and other
species is becoming a major problem for the survival of many species and it is
time that demographers consider their field of study as more than a social
science topic. It is multidisciplinary, with its perspectives in biology,
environment and management as much as in social science.
6)
It is high time that Population Studies is
viewed as Population Sciences and IIPS is the right place to have such multi
disciplinary work started in collaboration with other institutions, in keeping
with its name as International Institute for Population Sciences.
I hope
the IIPS, the alumni and the concerned authorities ponder over these issues and
take appropriate action. Let me once again wish the newly passed out degree and
diploma holders all success in their lives.