The world population is 7.3 billion people and ever since the number has crossed 1 billion critics say that world cannot sustain more people. Well as of now they have proved wrong. But what will be future? When will the global population growth end?

My grandfather had 13 siblings while my father had 5 siblings and I had 1. About 99% of people of my father’s age group have no more than 2 children, even though they had more than 2 sibilings. So what changed in one generation and why the average number of children in a house hold has fallen drastically?

I am a big fan of Prof Hans Rosling, who has numerous videos online explaining how the population will grow in future. He says that religion and number of babies per woman has little correlation. The important factors affecting the number of babies per woman are:

- Infant mortality
- Education of mother
- Income growth
- Increased age at marriage
- Increase in working women

According to Prof Rosling the world population will peak at 10 billion and not cross above that number. He has various statistical models behind this number. However the interesting number is that we have reached the “child peak”. We are not going to have any more number of children than we already have. Due to increase in life expectancy even though we will always have 2 billion children the total world population will increase by 3 billion and stay there.

So for a school what is the future? If the number of children in the world are not going to increase why do we still need new schools and will they have enough children to sustain the infrastructure?

The answer is in migration and change in the needs of parents.

70% of India stays in villages. In any developed economy not more than 25% of the country would stay in villages. So even if we hope in next 10 years we achieve 50% urbanisation we are talking of 24 crore people coming to stay in cities. So if they come and stay in top 100 cities it will be adding 2.4 lakh people in each city every year. They will bring children with them and they will need education. So schools need to be built in cities.

Another major problem is change in needs of the parents. Earlier Gujarati medium schools were in demand. Now English medium school are in demand. In metros people are preferring CBSE school so taking a job transfer from one city to another is not difficult. The rich prefer international schools which have a different standard all together. So schools will need to change themselves with changing times. Earlier having swimming and horse riding as part of school curriculum sounded farfetched. Today there are few schools already providing that and in future small schools will close down and such modern schools will increase.