MUMBAI – Mumbai recorded its slowest population growth in the last decade. The population of the city shrunk by 5.75 percent from 2001 to 2011, recording the sharpest drop in south Mumbai since 1901, revealed a detailed analysis of the latest Census data.
The city’s population plunged 6 percent in last decade. Though the suburbs added 8.01 percent more people in the same 10-year-period, their growth was the slowest since the 1920s. While some attribute the decline in population growth to people preferring smaller families, others say it is the saturation of the financial capital, weighed down as it is with disappearing job opportunities and shrinkage of affordable homes. The Census is yet to release migration-related data which could offer more insights.
P Arokiasamy of the International Institute for Population Sciences, an autonomous institute under the Union ministry of health and family welfare said “This is historically the lowest population growth in the island city. In the suburbs too, the rapidly declining trend indicates that population growth there too would hit zero or touch negative in the next decade,” as reported by Economic Times.
Demographers are of the opinion that Mumbai’s people shifts are in keeping with global trends where population expectedly hits the highest point at the budding stages of development and subsequently falls. The city’s population peaked till the fifties, with the suburbs experiencing exponential growth between the 1950s and 1980s.
Yet, the growth decline can’t undermine the challenges posed by the existing population. In the past decade five lakh more people were added in Mumbai, taking its population to 1.24 crore, with an average of 20,038 persons packed into every square kilometre in the city and 20,925 persons in the extended suburbs.
D P Singh of the centre for research methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences said people moved from the city to the suburbs when the real estate prices shot up, a shift that was now heading further north to neighboring townships such as Navi Mumbai and Thane. This possibly explains why Thane’s population in 2011 has gone up at a rate nearly four times that of Mumbai’s suburbs. He said “The city limits of Mumbai are saturated which explains the decade-on-decade decline of population. No new industry has come up in Mumbai recently and economic surveys have shown that employment is falling, both in terms of establishments as well as employers,” as reported by ET. The rehabilitation of slums to remote areas may explain some shifts.
Most notably, the declining population growth indicates the success of population stabilization in terms of declining total fertility rate (average number of children per women) as well as better healthcare facilities in terms of lower mortality, said Arokiasamy. He added that “It means there is faster diffusion of family planning norms here than in the past,” reported ET.
