Population Situation of Nepal

Def­i­n­i­tion and size of population :

By pop­u­la­tion we mean the total num­ber of chil­dren, youths, adults and old peo­ple of a cer­tain local­ity, vil­lage, city, dis­trict, region or a coun­try. In other words, pop­u­la­tion is a group of indi­vid­u­als coex­ist­ing at a given moment and is defined accord­ing to var­i­ous cri­te­ria. Nowa­days pop­u­la­tion is defined as the organ­i­sa­tion of peo­ple who are liv­ing their life with respect to socio-economic and cul­tural aspects.In short we can say pop­u­la­tion is the total no. of the peo­ple liv­ing in a cer­tain place at a cer­tain time.

Pop­u­la­tion sit­u­a­tion of the world:

The world’s pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing as the sky rock­et­ing. The pop­u­la­tion growth rate of the world is 1.4% annu­ally. The trend of pop­u­la­tion growth in the world is such that 3 new births takes every sec­ond, 255 thou­sand every day and 81 mil­lion every year. So the pop­u­la­tion dou­bling time is get­ting shorter and shorter. The pop­u­la­tion of the world was five bil­lion in 1987 and it reached six bil­lion by 11 july 1999, which was being cel­e­brated as  “the day of six bil­lion”, this day is also cel­e­brated as the “world pop­u­la­tion day”.

Pop­u­la­tion sit­u­a­tion of Nepal:

The size of pop­u­la­tion means the units of the pop­u­la­tion. The per­sons are the units that make the total pop­u­la­tion. It indi­cates the total num­ber of a par­tic­u­lar area at a par­tic­u­lar time. The size of the pop­u­la­tion is never con­stant or ever-changing.

In Nepal, the pop­u­la­tion cen­sus was started in 1911A.D. Pop­u­la­tion decreas­ing trend was up to 1930 A.D. The major cause behind this were

For­mula: AEIOU

A — Admis­sion (Recruit­ment) of juve­niles in Gorkha Sainik

E — Epi­demics (world war)

 I — Influenza

O — Out of cen­sus (hid­ing from census)

U — Unsci­en­tific census

Expla­na­tion:

The pop­u­la­tion was decreased con­tin­u­ously for the third cen­sus. The main cause behind it was the First World War dur­ing which max­i­mum of the Nepali juve­niles admit­ted in the Gorkha armies. Most of the peo­ple hide from the cen­sus even as they wanted to join into army and had thought the cen­sus stops them. The next rea­son was that the cen­sus was unsci­en­tific based on only esti­ma­tion or guess due to the prob­lems of the devel­op­men­tal infra­struc­tures at that time. Sim­i­larly, there was the great toll by the epi­demics of influenza with other dis­eases. In addi­tion to them, the con­tem­po­rary soci­ety was fully under the super­sti­tions and run with tra­di­tional norms and val­ues. The health prac­tices were quite poor. The edu­ca­tion was also not in the reach of the gen­eral peo­ple. By all the above men­tioned causes, there was preva­lence of dis­eases, degra­da­tion of health and untimely deaths of the lives.

Pop­u­la­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion & density:

The pop­u­la­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion is the spread of the peo­ple in the parts on the basis of the diver­sity in geo­graph­i­cal fea­ture, cli­mate, soil, nat­ural resources, and devel­op­men­tal facil­i­ties and so on. So the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the pop­u­la­tion is def­i­nitely uneven or unequal in Nepal. The pop­u­la­tion den­sity is defined as the total num­ber of the peo­ple resid­ing within a stan­dard unit of the area. i.e. one square kilo­me­ter. The total pop­u­la­tion of a coun­try or local­ity is divided by its total area (sq. km) to find out the pop­u­la­tion den­sity. The pop­u­la­tion den­sity of Nepal (157 per­sons sq km) is higher than that of China (107 per­sons per sq k.m.) and nearer to India (128  per­sons per sq k.m.) 

The pop­u­la­tion is unevenly dis­trib­uted as per the facil­i­ties of var­i­ous types avail­able. It depends on the fol­low­ing bases:

For­mula: FM’s are broad­cast­ing more ads on CFL bulbs

F — fer­til­ity of land

M — Mod­ern­iza­tion & civilization

S — Socio — cul­tural development

C — Climate

F — Facil­i­ties of devel­op­men­tal activ­i­ties Climate

L — Land struc­ture (topography)

Expla­na­tion:

No doubt , more peo­ple pre­fer to set­tle in the per­fect places in the view points of the favor­able cli­mate, plain land, avail­abil­ity of facil­i­ties, fer­til­ity of land, cen­tre for mod­ern­iza­tion or civ­i­liza­tion & socio-cultural devel­op­ment. So, such places are densely pop­u­lated. In con­trary to that fewer peo­ple live in the remote and unde­vel­oped places. In case of Nepal, major­ity of the peo­ple are liv­ing in Terai geo­graph­i­cal region and cen­tral devel­op­men­tal  region & the least of the peo­ple are set­tling in the Himalayan region and the remote place, mid-western region. But, the mod­er­ate pop­u­la­tion live in the Hilly region as every­thing is mod­er­ate in nature.

Pop­u­la­tion Com­po­si­tion:

The word com­po­si­tion is a term used to describe the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the num­bers of a pop­u­la­tion accord­ing to char­ac­ter­is­tics such as age, sex, mar­i­tal sta­tus, socio-economic sta­tus (caste, reli­gion, lan­guage, occu­pa­tion etc) and so on. The study of pop­u­la­tion com­po­si­tion helps to find out over­all devel­op­ment plans which are needed for the country. 

The geo­graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the pop­u­la­tion com­po­si­tion by age and sex is called pop­u­la­tion pyra­mid i.e. it shows the age and sex­wise per­cent­age of the population.

Impor­tance of pop­u­la­tion pyramid:

1. It pro­vides data of the pop­u­la­tion age and sexwise.
2. It reflects the sit­u­a­tion of the unde­vel­oped, devel­op­ing and devel­oped countries.
3. It gives the infor­ma­tion about the active and pas­sive pop­u­la­tion of the country.
4. It saves the time to col­lect and ana­lyze the data of age and sex­wise population.
5. It helps to the plan­ners, admin­is­tra­tors and politi­cians to set up var­i­ous strategies.