New Delhi, Sept. 21 -- From the time of Thomas Malthus in the early 19th Century, the world has tried to manage its population demographics to reduce demand on resources. Neo-Malthusianism, which subsumes the modern fields of population ecology and reproductive health economics, is about the study of population change, whether organic or encouraged, and its impact on society.

Since Malthus's time, the population of the world has grown ten times from 800 million to over 8 billion. The number of children per woman, measured by the total fertility rate (TFR), has dropped from about 5.5 then to 2.2 today. The global population is expected to grow to about 10 billion by the mid-2080s, before slowly declining. Many parts of the world today are...