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World Population Day - 11 July 

Asia's population is more than 4.4 billion people and rising, the region claims more than half of the total world's population. China with about 1.38 billion people is the most populous nation, but projections state that India will take the lead, in less than a decade.
Better healthcare and an increase in life expectancy are the main reasons for the world population to grow about 1.13 per cent per year.
World Population Day is observed on 11 July annually since it was established by the United Nations in 1989. It aims at drawing attention on important of population issues. Under the theme of 2016                   'Investing in teenage girls', the UN enlists the help of the world in supporting teenage girls to have the means to exercise their human right.

                                                                   It's a given fact that everywhere in the world, in every society and culture; the poorest people have the most children. But one cannot say with certainty whether having many children make people poor or does being poor make people have more children.

In fact, there are two schools of thought — one that believes that population growth causes poverty and the other that thinks poverty causes population growth. Those who think that population growth causes poverty advocate programmes in family planning and population education, while those who think poverty causes population growth favour emphasis on economic development, including employment opportunities, as they believe that if development is taken care of, birth rates will come down automatically. Poor people often want more children because children represent wealth, and are the only form of social security available to parents in their old age.

Whatever the case, there is little doubt that poverty and large family size go hand in hand. The size of a country's population has a critical impact on its development prospects. The countries in which poverty levels are high are generally those that have rapid increase in population and the highest fertility rates, while those that have managed to reduce fertility by investing in health care, including reproductive health, as well as education and gender equality, have made economic gains.

In countries with high birth rates and more children being born annually, funds that could be invested in development schemes have to be diverted to meeting the immediate food, healthcare, housing and education needs of growing population. This prevents making long term investments needed to alleviate poverty.

Large households with high incidence of poverty have fewer resources to invest in their children's education and health. The cost of books and other expenses prevents many families from sending their children to school, particularly damaging the educational prospects for girls.

With little education, the poor have few job prospects; they earn low wages that are inadequate to meet the basic needs. This means that families cannot afford enough nutritious food. As a result mothers remain malnourished and are more likely to give birth to premature or low-weight babies.

Lack of nutritious food also leaves the children lagging behind in physical and mental development; they often do not perform as well in school as do children from small families. With a reduced ability to learn, even if they are fortunate enough to go to school, they grow up with poor education levels. This leaves them with few job choices aside from manual labour, low paid jobs or farming in rural areas. Being dependent on low paid labour and farming they are likely to have more children to provide much-needed labour and income and security in old age, and unable to invest in their children's education and health.

With little access to education and health care, the next generation is likely to repeat the cycle.

One way to break this vicious cycle is to empower individuals, both women and men, with education, equal opportunities and the means to plan their families and create conditions to reduce poverty. Empowerment of women is of vital importance as un-empowered women are often unable to take decision on their own to use contraceptives and regulate their child bearing. They are also the ones most likely to believe that having many children will provide protection against poverty in old age. This is one reason why women's education and job opportunities are important as it gives them greater control over their lives. It has been established that educated women tend to have fewer children and participate fully in the labour market.

We can either adopt ways to reduce poverty and in turn contain population growth, or expand our family planning programme to reduce the rate of population growth; one will lead to another. The best way in our set up with a burgeoning population of over 180 million and poverty rate hovering between 25 to 30 per cent, is to adopt a two pronged approach and work at both ends — enhance our family planning programme and take measures to reduce poverty by investing in reproductive health, education, women's empowerment and gender equality.

  Some of the objectives of celebrating the world population day are mentioned below:

• It is celebrated to protect and empower youths of both gender like girls and boys.
• To offer them detail knowledge about the sexuality and delay marriages till they become able to understand their responsibilities.
• Educate youths to avoid unwanted pregnancies by using reasonable and youth friendly measures.
• Educate people to remove the gender stereotypes from society.
• Educate them about the pregnancy related illnesses to raise the public awareness about dangers of early childbirth.
• Educate them about STD (sexually transmitted diseases) to get prevented from various infections.
• Demand for some effective laws and policies implementation in order to protect girl child rights.
• Make sure about the access of equal primary education to both girls and boys.
• Make sure the easy access of reproductive health services everywhere as part the basic primary health for each co

• S.No.	Census Year	Population [24]	% Change [24]
  1	1951	361,088,000	-----
  2	1961	439,235,000	21.6
  3	1971	548,160,000	24.8
  4	1981	683,329,000	24.7
  5	1991	846,387,888	23.9
  6	2001	1,028,737,436	21.5
  7	2011	1,210,726,932	17.7

  uple.