Theoretical Framework on Studies of Population

Abstract

Population control and management is the most burning problem of the day and also a very challenging job in India. The programme managers and service providers of population control and management are tasked with high valued performance expectation to prevent runaway population growth in the states of India and restore population stabilisation in the country. Such functionaries are expected to be well conversant with the theoretical background of the areas of their functional domain. Generally speaking, population control and family planning does not belong to any particular of academic discipline. It happens to address a lot of cross cutting issues ranging from economics to medical science, from education to women empowerment, from child health to communication, from religious faith to legal provisions, and from human development to climatic change and sustainable development and so on. All these subject areas have their own big subject universe to significantly influence the reproductive behaviour of the citizens and impact the size of population. Since the knowledge of relevant subjects areas is crucial in the functioning areas of population control and family planning, it is only desirable that programme managers and service providers would need to scale up their skill and institutional capacity building to discharge their functional responsibilities. Economics happened to be the first discipline to take up seriously the problem of population in theoretical analysis. The broad outlines of theories of population, like Malthusian theory of population, the optimum theory of population and the theory of demographic transition have been touched, at the first instance, to familiarise with subject-environment before initiating programme intervention, its focused implementation and monitoring for the intended outcome.