Draw the current population pyramid of India. What policy measures would you recommend for population dynamics to achieve sustainability? (Answer in 350 words)

- Draw the current population pyramid of India. What policy measures would you recommend for population dynamics to achieve sustainability? (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
India's age structure has stopped being a pyramid, and population policy has not yet caught up with the shape that replaced it.
Body
1. The pyramid as it now stands: Each row is an age band, men on the left and women on the right, and each figure is that group's share of the whole population, carried forward from the 2011 Census and the latest National Family Health Survey.

| Age band | Males (per cent of all) | Females (per cent of all) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 60 and above | ▆▆▆▆▆ 5 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆ 6 |
| 45-59 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 8 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 8 |
| 30-44 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 11 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 10 |
| 15-29 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 14 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 13 |
| 0-14 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 13 | ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ 12 |

2. What its shape says about India's population: The base has stopped widening. The total fertility rate reached 2.0 in the fifth National Family Health Survey, below the replacement level of 2.1. The bulge in the working ages is the demographic dividend, and it is a window: the share aged sixty and above, about a tenth now, is projected to approach a fifth by the middle of the century. Kerala and Tamil Nadu already have the profile of an ageing society while Bihar and Uttar Pradesh retain a broad base, and the youngest cohorts hold fewer girls than a natural sex ratio at birth would produce.
3. The policy measures you recommend: Keep fertility policy voluntary and targeted: drop the two-child conditions attached to government jobs and local office, and concentrate effort on the districts where fertility remains high, with the full basket of contraceptives, spacing methods and male participation, since vasectomy is a negligible share of sterilisations. Invest in the dividend while it lasts: school quality, which ASER identifies as the binding constraint, vocational training, and female labour force participation, which is among the lowest in the world. Prepare for ageing now: pensions worth more than the token central old-age assistance, geriatric care built into the public health system, and health insurance extended to everyone above seventy. Make entitlements portable across states. Enforce the law against sex selection.
4. How they serve sustainability: Sustainability is a question of consumption and capability rather than headcount. India's population is expected to peak around the 2060s whatever is done now, so what matters is whether the cohort in school today reaches old age employed, healthy and supported. Coercion is also counter-productive, as the sterilisation drive of the Emergency demonstrated; voluntary decline has been faster than any target ever compelled.
Conclusion
A pyramid that has become a barrel is not a crisis but a deadline.