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Business News/ Opinion / When numbers come alive
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When numbers come alive

The more you educate women, the later they get married and the shorter the time they have available to reproduce

Photo: MintPremium
Photo: Mint

Numbers, a lot of people think, are dry as sawdust and not much more interesting. Maybe so. Still, I’d like to suggest that you can often look at them in ways that make them come alive. Two such, in this column.

Some years ago, I ran across some figures that told an interesting story. They were from a 1969 study (cited in Socio-cultural Dimensions of Marriage in Rural India by N. Audinarayana) that related the education Indian women receive with the age at which they get married (often referred to a “singulate mean age at marriage", or SMAM). As you might imagine, the study noted a positive correlation between the two. That is, the more educated a woman is, the older she is on her wedding date. (This also generally means she has children later). Now, this is no earthshaking revelation, of course, nor is it true of just India. Countries across the world have found that educating women produces societal changes like this one. So, this correlation was no surprise.

Still, two numbers mentioned jumped out at me. The average totally uneducated Indian woman gets married at 15.9 years (15 years and about 11 months) old. Give that average young woman eight years of education—till middle school—and she is 17.5 years (17 years and about 6 months) old on her wedding day.

The difference: just about 18 months. Eighteen is twice nine months, and I’m sure that number means something to you. Consider it this way. Give the average Indian woman eight years of education, this study tells us, and that reduces her window to have children—at least as measured by the metric of when she gets married—by 18 months. That’s effectively two less potential pregnancies. Not that she and her husband may not still produce several babies. But she has 18 months less time available to her: two less potential babies.

If slowing the growth of our population is a priority, this one figure captures well how educating women contributes towards that goal. The rest of the study—and plenty of more recent studies—only underlines the story. The more you educate women, the later they get married, the shorter the time they have available to reproduce—and so the less the number of babies they give birth to.

And what this suggests is that if slowing population growth is indeed a priority, we need not restrict ourselves to asking couples to have fewer kids (remember “Do ya teen bus" and “We Two Our One"?) Just as effective might be to encourage couples to marry later, have their children later.

Another number I found recently can also stand a dose of closer analysis. It wasn’t in a table, but was instead the basis of a news report. Mumbai, said the report, has 430 cars per kilometre of road, the highest such density of any city in the country.

Like with women’s education and marriage, news like this may not surprise you. We all know there are a lot of cars in Mumbai, and in fact in every city. Still, remember that this report examines not the absolute number, but the density of cars. The city has a certain amount of road space, usually measured as the number of kilometres of roads, and it hasn’t changed significantly in years. In contrast, the number of cars has risen steadily for many years, far outstripping the rate at which we can add roads. The density of cars is simply the number of cars divided by the number of road kilometres. That gives us the figure above, 430.

It’s one of those numbers that sounds high, though comparing it to other cities’ densities would help put it in some perspective. But another way to put it in perspective is to imagine all those cars on the streets together. What would happen then?

To answer that, let’s ask what the average car’s length is. Maruti’s Alto and Ford’s Figo are less than 4 metres long. Honda’s City and VW’s Vento, just under 4.5m. Toyota’s Innova and other SUVs get close to 5m. Trucks, of course, are much longer. Looking at these, it seems reasonable to assume the average car on Mumbai’s streets is about 4m long.

So, 430 of them will take up 430x4, or 1,720m, or close to 2km. You’ve got it: every km of Mumbai’s roads must accommodate almost 2km of cars.

One way to make sense of this is that if all Mumbai’s cars appeared on its roads together, we may have to stack them two deep.

For me, that mental image of stacked cars is the single best descriptor of our plight in the age of the automobile. Not even educating our women will make a difference there.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. A Matter of Numbers explores the joy of mathematics, with occasional forays into other sciences.

Comments are welcome at dilip@livemint.com. To read Dilip D’Souza’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dilipdsouza

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Published: 25 Aug 2016, 11:10 PM IST
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