Close on the heels of the world population crossing the 7 billion-mark, the new Human Development Report of UNDP has revealed a major reason behind India’s growing numbers. While we are worrying about high total fertility rates (TFRs) of 2.6, new data points out that our adolescent fertility rates (AFR) are even more shocking at 86.3.
Adolescent fertility rate—defined as the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19—is among the highest for India in South Asia. Only Nepal and Afghanistan have higher rates at 103.4 and 118.7.
One of the main drivers of high gender inequality in India, which has the poorest (129th) Gender Inequality Index rank in South Asia (leaving aside Afghanistan which is poorer at 141), high adolescent fertility rate reflects that our child marriage prevention laws have simply not worked and our contraception prevalence rate remains poor at 54%. Even Sri Lanka has a higher contraception prevalence rate at 68%.
On gender equality, India lags far behind China which is ranked a handsome 35 in the world (lower the rank on GII, better the state of gender equality). In China adolescent fertility rate is just 8.4, while TFR is also low at 1.6.
Even on the other two major components that drive gender equality—women’s representation in national Parliament and the participation of age 25 years plus women in economic activities—India is far behind many even in South Asia. Nepal is the best in this category with 33.2% women in Parliament, while China and Pakistan have 21.3% and 21%, respectively—much better than India’s 10.7%.
As far as people who have attained secondary education are concerned, in India the percentage is 26.6 for women as against 50.4 for men—indicating a wide gap, which is also seen in labour force participation, where women make up 32.8% workforce as against 81.1% men.
No comments:
Post a Comment