Week 1–Activity Post

The country I have selected to research for this class will be India. I decided to choose this country because I have a lot of interest in some of the complexities of their biomedical systems and the effects of Westernization. I am still deciding what exactly I would like to focus on for my final blog, but doing this research on the country’s demographics has been interesting and has helped give me quite a few ideas.

To begin, India is a very large country that is home to 1,236,686,700 people.  Their population is also fairly young with 434,782,100 people who are under the age of 18. Since 1970, their life expectancy has risen from 48.8 years in age to a whopping 66.2 years old as of 2012. The rise in life expectancy has been attributed to the increasing education on healthy diets, access to immunizations, and access to clean drinking water according to the Times of India. The GNI in India as of 2012 was $1,530 per capita with a GDP per capita average annual growth rate of 5% between 1990—2012. This seems like a fairly low annual growth rate, but only 32.7% of the population lives below the international poverty line between 2007—2011. According to the information on the UNICEF website, the country uses most of their public spending on education and military and only 1.1% of public spending is allocated towards health. If this number were increased, I am sure a lot of the other demographic and economic indicators would rise, as more people would be well enough to reproduce and supply the workforce.

As far as women and education, it appears as though there is a lack in literacy rates and enrollment of women compared to men. The literacy rate of women in India is only 67.6% compared to men. According to the Borgen Project, the reason for this low literacy rate is because India is a male-dominated society. Because of the cultural norms in society, women obtaining an education is not quite as important as their participation in other things within society or the household. Although, their pre-primary school participation is fairly even with 55.9% of females and 53.8% of males. This rate drops significantly when getting to secondary school participation with 58.5% of males and only 48.7% of women.

Lastly, India’s rate of progress shows that since the 1970s, the under-5 mortality rates has significantly dropped, which can be attributed to the same reasons of the increased life expectancy discussed above. There has also been an increase of GDP per capita average annual growth rate from the 1970s, which shows that the country is slowly improving its economy. With the rising life expectancy and the total fertility rate dropping from 5.5 children per woman in 1970 to 2.5 children per woman as of 2012, this could mean that the population will be having less children per household, which would decrease the population burden on society and could potentially lead to more women being able to contribute to the workforce. By looking at the disparities by household wealth and the disparities by residence, it is obvious that rural and poorer households are significantly lacking in health and access to health treatments. Only 23.8% of rural residences have availability to diarrhea treatment and oral rehydration salts compared to 32.6% of households in urban communities that have access. This can show that rural communities have less attention and access to equal medical treatments compared to those who live in urban communities with higher population rates.  

In conclusion, there are a lot of inequalities that currently exist in India. Whether it is due to gender roles or norms within their society or whether it is due to the communities in which individuals live, it is obvious that there are areas that could use improvement. This has brought up some very interesting rates and information that I was unfamiliar with, so I am very interested in furthering this research for the final project.

Sources:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Life-expectancy-in-India-goes-up-by-5-years-in-a-decade/articleshow/29513964.cms

https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html#119

http://www.in.undp.org/content/india/en/home/countryinfo/introduction.html

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