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Welcome to
IASP
While concern about the size of India's population has
been shown by the intelligentia right from the beginning of the present
century, active interest in the study of population became pronounced only
with the launching of planning for economic and social development after
independence. The First Five Year Plan, 1951-56 duly recognized population
as an important parameter requiring careful consideration in the planning of
development effort and emphasized the need for undertaking population
research oriented to developmental policies and programmes. This was
followed up during the Second Five Year Plan by the establishment of several
demographic research centres under the then Ministry of Health and Family
Planning (now the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare) and a Demographic
Training & Research Centre (now known as International Institute for
Population Sciences) at Bombay under the joint sponsorship of the United
Nations, Government of India, and Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. Since then
population matters have received increasing attention of scholars from both
social and bio-medical sciences and the number of those specializing in
population research and studies has steadily increased.
By 1963, when the first Asian Population Conference met in New Delhi, the
number of scholars with active interest in population had become quite
sizable. The large group of Indian participants who had gathered in New
Delhi for this Conference had in their informal discussions expressed the
need for a professional organization of Indian demographers like those
operating in several social science disciplines like economics, sociology,
geography, statistics, history, etc. This need was more forcefully
reiterated in 1969 at the informal meeting of the Indian demographers which
was held in London at the time of the General Conference of the
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.
It was in response to such repeated expressions of the need for a
professional organization of those engaged in population research that the
group of demographers located in Delhi/New Delhi took. a lead in the matter
in 1970 with the encouragement and active support of Professor Asok Mitra
and late Shri A. Chandra Sekhar, successive Registrar Generals and Census
Commissioners of India. A small preparatory committee, formed for the
purpose, discussed the steps necessary to establish the organization and
delegated the responsibility of drafting the Memorandum of Association
together with its Rule and Regulations and that of making necessary
arrangements for its registration under the Societies Act to a subcommittee
comprising Shri S. P. Jain and Shri R. P. Goyal. Finally the Association was
registered in February, 1971 under the name of Indian Association for the
Study of Population (IASP).
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