What’s behind the ‘have 3-4 children’ cash incentive in Andhra? He explained 2 major concerns

When N. announced Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, on cash incentives for families if they have a third and fourth child, said the state’s overall population is aging because “young couples these days do not have enough children”.

The data bears out some of that, but there is also a broader political play at play, as the timing suggests.

This is in contrast to the two-child policy – “Hum, hamari do” – It has been promoted all over India for decades.

The announcement came during a public event in Narsanapetta, Srikakulam district, at a time when southern states are experiencing fertility rates much lower than the national average. This also comes weeks after the debate over political representation in numbers alone was exacerbated by the failure of the border demarcation bill.

The policy, as we reported earlier in March, includes it as well $1,000 per month food support for five years for the third child, free education until the age of 18, and 12 months of parental leave, including two months of paternity leave.

A replacement level is the number of children to ensure that the total population remains constant, taking into account death rates across ages.

The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS), 2019-21, put India’s national TFR at 2. At the state level, only five states were found to be above replacement level. These are Bihar (2.98), Meghalaya (2.91), Uttar Pradesh (2.35), Jharkhand (2.26), and Manipur (2.17). All remaining countries were below 2.1.

The southern states are clustered between 1.5 and 1.8, with Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana at 1.8, and Karnataka and Andhra at 1.7. These are comparable to or lower than rates in many European countries.

Naidu cited the number 1.5 when talking about 2023 data, and said the declining trend in the birth rate could pose challenges for the economy. He told the association that if current trends continue, 23% of AP’s population could be elderly, over 60, by 2047, and 58% of families in the state currently have only one child. The number of elderly people is 10% in Andhra as per the recent data mentioned by the government.

However, political parties in north India, such as the Samajwadi Party, have called for population growth to be controlled, calling it “the biggest problem India faces today”.

However, this difference extends largely along a North-South axis, with high-fertility northern states still treating population growth as a development concern, while southern states increasingly view declining fertility as the most pressing problem.

The Population Management Policy, presented to the General Assembly in March, described this shift as a move from “family planning” to “population care.”

“At one time, I worked for family planning. But today, the children themselves have become wealth. We all now have to work for the children,” Naidu, 76, said at an event on Saturday.

Of the 489 members present that day in the Lok Sabha, 278 voted for it and 211 against; But the constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority of the members present, and thus the amendment fails. This was the first defeat for the bill brought by the Narendra Modi-led NDA regime.

The issue of demarcation directly affects states such as Andhra Pradesh.

Parliamentary constituencies in India were allocated on the basis of the 1971 census – a freeze that was implemented to avoid penalizing states that successfully reduced fertility rates.

Now, a Lok Sabha MP from Kerala represents about 1.75 million people, while a MP from Bihar represents about 3.35 million people. If demarcation of borders based solely on population were to proceed, the southern states, which have done better family planning, would lose seats proportionately, while the more populous northern states would gain.

No wonder Stalin, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu – who had also called for more children in the past – said his state had “defeated Delhi”.

“Demarcation is about representation, who has a voice in India’s democracy. It should strengthen the union, not weaken its balance,” the DMK leader said. DMK MP Kanimozhi, who opposed the main bill and two related bills in the Lok Sabha, said, “These three bills, disguised as if they support reservation for women, constitute the single biggest attack on India’s federal structure.” It used the argument that southern states complied with government calls for population control.

Home Minister Amit Shah, in response to demands for written assurances, said before the vote that he was ready to introduce a formal amendment that would ensure all states get a uniform 50% increase in seats, while maintaining their current quota.

But the Congress-led opposition has instead said that the 33% quota could be given within the existing 543-member Assembly, without the need for fresh demarcation of boundaries, and the broader question, whether population alone should be the basis for the Lok Sabha quota, needs to be debated at length.

In the 2024 general elections, the BJP won 240 seats in the Lok Sabha, short of the 272 needed for a majority, and the BJP’s 16 seats became the BJP’s largest ally within the NDA, and thus essential to the coalition’s working majority of 293 seats.

(MP and Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi even referred to the number “16” as a riddle in the Parliament session.)

Naidu later posted to

With the flow of reasoning, Naidu identified the dangers to the representation of the South, while also supporting a bill containing this danger, based on the verbal assurances given by Shah. Whatever the TDP did, the government did not have the numbers anyway, as it turned out.

In addition, there is an element of coercion that erodes women’s ability to make reproductive decisions.

The United Nations Report on the State of World Population 2025 provides a nuanced lens on this argument. In India, the report says, many women who want more children cannot have them because of a lack of access to health care. Economic pressures or social restrictions. Thus, women who do not want more children are sometimes unable to avoid having them, for example because of pressures to have boys. The report says that policies that push women to have more children, or fewer, ignore this point.

The Lancet, the world’s best health journal, reported in 2025 that Japan’s cash benefit policies showed only a 12% probability of reversing fertility decline by 2030.

More explicitly with regard to India, scholar Rukmini S wrote, citing Dean Spears and Michael Girosso’s 2025 book “After the Spike”: “…they claim that the world is better in so many different ways, small and large, that the opportunity cost of having children is too great.”

“Despite the argument by politicians in south India that their states have low fertility rates as a result of successfully implemented family planning programmes, what is more likely is that these states are on the same path as the rest of the world, with India’s poorer states slightly lower on the same ladder,” she wrote.

AP Health Minister Saurabh Gaur recently acknowledged this challenge, saying: “We are now facing the same problem as developed countries – a growing population of non-working age.”

To date, the state government has not published any projections modeling the expected positive impact of its policies on population growth rates.