  We revisit the population of normal pulsars in the Galactic field in an
`evolutionary' approach. By comparing the distributions of various parameters
of synthetic pulsars detectable by the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey, the
Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array Survey, and two Swinburne Multibeam surveys
with those of the real pulsars detected by the same surveys, we find that a
good and physically realistic model can be obtained by using a uniform
distribution of the braking index in the range of 2.5 to 3.0, a uniform
distribution of the cosine of the angle between the spin and the magnetic axis
in the range of 0 to 1, a log-normal birth distribution of the surface magnetic
field with the mean and the standard deviation as 12.85 and 0.55 respectively
while keeping the distributions of other parameters unchanged from the ones
most commonly used in the literature. We have also replaced the universal
'death-line' by a `death-condition' specific to each individual pulsar. We find
that our model is better than the most popular model. With our improved model,
we predict that an all-sky pulsar survey with phase-I SKA-MID will detect about
nine thousand normal pulsars in the Galactic field. Among these pulsars, a
considerable number will produce continuous gravitational waves in the
operational range of the future ground-based gravitational waves detectors like
LIGO A$+$, and in certain cases, the spin-down limit of the gravitational wave
strains will be well below the detection sensitivity limit. We also provide a
fit for the present-day distributions of the spin periods and 1400 MHz
luminosities of the whole normal pulsar population in the Galactic field (which
are potentially observable) and those can be used in future population studies
under the snapshot approach.
