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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 13 India’s Demographic Dividend — THINK ABOUT IT

Book page 183 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
If the replacement rate is less than 2, what will the population pyramid look like? Will there ever be a situation where the number of children is less than the number of aged people? What is likely to happen to the population of such a country over time?
Answer

It stops being a pyramid. A population pyramid is nothing more than a stack of birth cohorts — each bar is the group of people born in one period, thinned by the deaths that have happened since. So the outline of the pyramid is a record of how many babies were born in each past year.

If each woman has fewer than about 2.1 children, then every new cohort is smaller than the one that produced it. The bar at the bottom becomes shorter than the bars above it, and the shape inverts.

Fertility above 2.1 Fertility about 2.1 Fertility below 2.1 wide base — triangle each cohort bigger than the one above straight sides — bell cohorts roughly equal in size narrow base — urn each cohort smaller than the one above
What the fertility rate does to the shape. The pyramid is simply a stack of birth cohorts: its outline records how many babies were born each year, thinned out by deaths as the cohort climbs.

The chapter describes exactly this happening to India: the pyramid “looks less like a triangle and is more bell-shaped. The base has become narrower, which means families are having fewer children than before.” Carry the fertility rate further below replacement, as Japan has, and the bell becomes an urn — narrow at the bottom, widest in the middle and upper-middle.

Will children ever be fewer than aged people? Yes — and Fig. 6.18 shows when it happens for India. The purple 65+ curve rises steadily while the red 0–14 curve, which peaked around 2010 at about 0.42 billion, falls. The two lines cross at about 2050, at roughly 0.3 billion each. After that India has more people over 65 than under 15. Japan is already past that point: its median age is 50 (Fig. 6.17), which means half the country is older than 50.

What happens to such a population over time? It goes through three phases, and the middle one surprises people:

  1. It keeps growing for a while. This is the important part. Falling below replacement does not shrink a population at once, because the number of births depends on two things — how many children each woman has, and how many women of child-bearing age there are. A country that grew fast in the past has huge numbers of young women alive right now, so even small families still produce a lot of babies.
  2. It peaks. China’s fertility had been far below replacement for decades, yet its population peaked only in 2022, at 1.43 billion.
  3. It shrinks, and ages as it shrinks. China is projected to be at 1.31 billion by 2050 — a fall of 120 million, about 8 per cent — while the share of people over 65 rises from 14 per cent in 2023 to 26 per cent in 2050.
Why the consequences bite so hard: the pyramid is also a picture of who works and who is supported. Turn it upside down and you have a small number of workers at the bottom supporting a large number of retired people at the top. The chapter lists what follows: fewer workers to replace those who retire, so the economy can slow; more pressure on healthcare, because older adults need more of it; and difficulty paying pensions and providing services, because there are fewer young taxpayers. The chapter also notes that this has proved very hard to reverse — China ended the One-Child Policy in 2015 and now allows up to three children, yet its fertility rate is still below replacement, and “policies in many nations have attempted to revive the fertility rate but have not been very successful so far.”
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