Population projection by age, sex, and educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 35 provinces of India, 2011-2101: Technical report on projecting the regionally explicit socioeconomic heterogeneity in India

K.C., S., Speringer, M., & Wurzer, M. (2017). Population projection by age, sex, and educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 35 provinces of India, 2011-2101: Technical report on projecting the regionally explicit socioeconomic heterogeneity in India. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-17-004

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Abstract

This working paper documents and explains our methodological approaches and technical details about how we conducted subnational population projections for India. This research is motivated by two research questions: (1) How does the accounting of socioeconomic heterogeneity, measured by educational attainment, improve population projections for India?, and (2) How will changing patterns in urbanization affect the population projections, depending on the spatial scale (national vs. subnational) considered in the projections?

Projections at national and subnational level can provide essential information for planning and implementing government policies, including the allocation of budget and resources. In a country like India national projections ignoring spatial and socioeconomic heterogeneity would be too short-sighted considering its sheer population size of 1.2 billion in 2011.

It was surprising to see that our population projections for India with baseline scenario were consistent with the UN medium variant and Wittgenstein Centre SSP2 until 2070. We found that while our fertility assumptions are lower, our mortality assumptions were also lower and compensated for the lower number of births (and no international migration) with higher number of survivors. The results show that the overall fertility for India is lower than estimated/assumed by UN and Wittgenstein Centre due to lower starting values in our projection as well as due to explicit consideration of education in the model. This results in a rapid TFR decline to about 1.85 children per woman in the next two decades and stabilization for the rest of the century. The projection resulted in slower rate of urbanization in India from 31% in 2011 to 40% in 2051, compared to the UN urbanization projection and we presented several explanations for that.

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