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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Demographer gets census right, almost by GS Mudur

Demographer gets census right, almost by GS Mudur

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published Published on Apr 5, 2011   modified Modified on Apr 5, 2011
Armed with a clutch of numbers, drawing on raw data as well as intelligent guesswork, Leela Visaria had six years ago generated a figure for India’s population in 2011 that is closest to what the 2011 census has actually thrown up.

Visaria, a demographer at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), an academic institution in Ahmedabad, had predicted that India’s population would grow to 1,204 million, just six million away from the provisional census figure of 1,210 million — the percentage variation comes to 0.46 per cent.

Her figure released in an academic publication Twenty-First Century India in 2004 was the closest to the outcome compared to population projections by other agencies, including the national commission on population, the UN and the US Census Bureau. Their projections for 2011 were 18 million to 21 million people off mark, although the variations were within two per cent of the provisional figure.

“I haven’t found anything surprising yet,” Visaria, honorary professor at the GIDR, said in an interview, nearly six years after she fed a set of assumptions to a standard software program designed to process those inputs and churn out population figures.

She assigned numbers for fertility rates in different states, likely movement of people into and out of India and life expectancy at birth, making some assumptions as well as using raw data from the 2001 census to guide the projection effort.

“For 10-year population projections, we have to concentrate on the likely size of the population up to nine years of age. The rest of the people are already there from the previous census,” Visaria said.

A technical group set up by the National Commission on Population had made assumptions about fertility, the sex ratio at birth, mortality, migration as well as the impact of HIV on the population growth to arrive at its projection of 1,192 million.

Visaria had also anticipated the low child-sex ratio which, she believes, may be explained through the widespread neglect of girl children rather than through prenatal sex selection and selective abortion of female foetuses. “This neglect lowers the chances of survival of young girls — this is evident from the age-specific mortality data,” Visaria said. “The result is the deficit of girls we’re seeing now.”

A government sample survey of 2008 shows that age-specific death rates among girls between one and four years of age was 38 per cent higher compared to boys of the same age across India. In rural areas, the rate was 41 per cent higher in girls than in boys.

Social scientists suspect that such high mortality could be due to parents ignoring ill health of girl children until they become very sick.

“This is a disadvantage young girls continue to experience in India — it is a pattern not noticed in most other countries,” Visaria said.

The Telegraph, 5 April, 2011, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110405/jsp/nation/story_13811521.jsp


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