-Outlook India While nationwide lockdown is unavoidable and is a wise decision to contain the spread of the virus, there is a need to address the possibility of an unintended Baby Boom among poor and vulnerable groups. With most countries following nationwide lockdown or stay at home orders due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, there has been a debate on a possible unintended Baby Boom across the world. Although many demographers from...

-Livemint.com News of India recording the world’s most New Year’s Day births seems to have revived talk of a strict population control policy. But there is no need for panic. Nor state intervention. For decades, doomsday theories of our population boom have been used to explainrising poverty and unemployment, food shortages and health crises, environmental degradation and climate change. This New Year’s Day, Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimated that nearly...

-The Indian Express The gangrape may have brought the tribal councils of this West Bengal district to notoriety, but it wasn't the first sexual abuse on their orders. What is more at play here though is growing outside interference in a region considered a vote bank, writes Madhuparna Das. On January 29 evening, 900 people of a village in Birbhum district's Labhpur block gathered near the hut of their headman. The hut,...

-The Indian Express The country's demography is witnessing some new trends. While the working age group (15-64 years) has predictably seen an increase in the number of youths, the curtains may have begun falling over the Baby Boom years that fuelled this bulge in the first place. These have been indicated by the latest 'Single Year Age Data' released by the Census of India from its 2011 census numbers. While the increase...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...