IIPS

In 1956, the United Nations, the Government of India and the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, jointly established the Institute to serve as a regional center for teaching, training and conducting research in the area of population studies in the ESCAP region. Prior to 1970, the IIPS was popularly known as Demographic Training and Research Centre (DTRC). It was declared as a deemed university on August 15, 1985. The Institute is an autonomous institution under the administrative control of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. It also offers academic courses to strengthen the reproductive health, research and training programmes and provides consultancy to government and non-governmental organizations and other academic institutions.

The IIPS has helped in building a nucleus of professionals in the field of population and health in various countries in the ESCAP region. During the past 50 years, students from 42 different countries of Asia and the Pacific region, Africa, and North America have been trained at the Institute. Many, who are trained at the Institute, now occupy key positions in the field of population and health in governments of various countries, universities and research institutes as well as in reputed national and international organizations.

India entered the new millennium with a population exceeding
one billion. Malthusian fears of famine and food
shortages seem to have been banished by the fruits of the
Green Revolution. In the 1960s, when I first heard of
Malthus in an undergraduate economics class, India’s
population was a little over half the present number, but
famine, food imports and PL-480 were everyday words.
The transformation of agriculture consigned Malthus to
the seminar rooms of academia. In his 1995 lecture at
Delhi, Amartya Sen traces the origins of the ‘analysis of
the population problem’ noting that the Marquis de Condorcet
had preceded Malthus in worrying about the consequences
of increasing populations: ‘When the increase
of the number of men surpasses their means of subsistence,
the necessary result must be either a diminution of
happiness and population, or, at least, a kind of oscillation
between good and evil. In societies arrived at this
term, will not this oscillation be a constantly subsisting
cause of periodic misery?’ Unlike Malthus, Condorcet
was an optimist, who saw that solutions to the problems
created by burgeoning populations would emerge from ‘a
cooperative response through the reasoned agency of the
people themselves’. Condorcet’s view seems to have been
vindicated, as voluntary family planning has completely.