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.

Population-First a community

Population First is an NGO working on population and health issues within the framework of women's rights and social development. We believe that population is not an issue of numbers alone. Numbers are but a manifestation of poor social development and lack of access to health and contraceptive services. Across the country, fertility is highest where social development is low and gender inequality is high.

Population First is a communications and advocacy initiative for a balanced, planned and stable population. Reducing gender imbalances, investing for the current and future population and reaching the goal of family size of two children per couple are our key communications objectives.

In demographic terms, the population explosion is a numbers
equation, birth rate decline lagging behind a fall in death rate.
But in terms of historical action, the population explosion is the
unequal diffusion of the two technologies of death control and
birth control. One element, probably the most important, in this
inequality stems from broad societal attitudes towards human
reproduction. In the last analysis, it seems to be attitudes
among decision makers and elite members of a society as they
relate to the availability of choices, rather than attitudes
among the world’s contemporary millions, that still slow the
repairing of the mistakes

World Population

The world population is the total number of humans on Earth at a given time. In February 2008, the world's population is believed to have reached over 6.60 billion. In line with population projections, this figure continues to grow at rates that were unprecedented before the 20th century, although the rate of increase has almost halved since its peak, which was reached in 1963, of 2.2 percent per year. The world's population, on its current growth trajectory, is expected to reach nearly 9 billion by the year 2050.

Censuses taken between 300–400 AD showed over 50 million people living in the combined eastern and western Roman empire.(citation Dr. Kenneth W. Harl, tulane.edu)

Below is a table with historical and predicted population figures shown in millions. The availability of historical population figures varies by region. Please see World population estimates for more figures.

Different regions have different rates of population growth, but in the unusual case of the 20th century, the world saw the biggest increase in its population in human history due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity made by the Green Revolution.

In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's population was then growing at the rate of 1.14% (or about 75 million people) per year, down from a peak of 86 million per year in 1987. In the last few centuries, the number of people living on Earth has increased many times over. By the year 2000, there were 10 times as many people on Earth than there were 300 years ago. According to data from the CIA's 2005–2006 World Factbooks, the world human population currently increases by 203,800 every day. The 2007 CIA factbook increased this to 211,090 people every day.

Population Explosion

In sociology and biology a population is the collection of people or individuals of a particular species. A population shares a particular characteristic of interest most often that of living in a given geographic area. In taxonomy population is a low-level taxonomic rank.

Human populations can be defined by many characteristics such as mortality, migration, family (marriage and divorce), public health, work and the labor force, and family planning. Various aspects of human behavior in populations are also studied in sociology, economics, and geography.

Study of populations is almost always governed by the laws of probability, and the conclusions of the studies may thus not always be applicable to some individuals. This odd factor may be reduced by statistical means, but such a generalization may be too vague to imply anything. Demography is used extensively in marketing, which relates to economic units, such as retailers, to potential customers. For example, a coffee shop that wants to sell to a younger audience looks at the demographics of an area to be able to appeal to this younger audience.

According to papers published by the United States Census Bureau, the world population hit 6.5 billion (6,500,000,000) on January 25, 2006. The United Nations Population Fund designated October 12, 1999 as the approximate day on which world population reached 6 billion. This was about 12 years after world population reached 5 billion, in 1987. However, the population of some countries, such as Nigeria, is not even known to the nearest million,[citation needed] so there is a considerable margin of error in such estimates.