Picture Credits: Rajesh Mehta

At the time of Independence, India was a low-income, high-fertility country with poor life expectancy and infant mortality rates (IMR), but it has started looking good on many health indicators now, Atul Thakur’s analysis shows

Median age up in a still young country

Median age is the age that divides a country’s population into two halves – younger and older than it. In the 1950s, India’s median age was below 20, a level seen across most of Africa now. While India’s median age is still among the youngest in the world, it has inched closer to where Europe was in the 1950s

India’s total fertility rate – births per woman – has declined from 5.9 in the 1950s, when the UK and the US were at 2.2 and 3.3, respectively, to 2.2 now. It is among the lowest in large Asian countries. Fears of a ‘population explosion’ have faded

India’s IMR is at the level of the ‘first world’ in the 1950s, although Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand are at the current level of the US and the UK

Since the 1950s, India’s life expectancy has increased from 37 years to 69 years. There is scope for further improvement, though, as it is among the lowest in the subcontinent, and also among other large Asian countries.