India’s population will soon decline, perhaps very quickly

In the sprawling slums of Delhi, where Parul Jain lived in the 1970s, children were everywhere. It was not unusual, then, for her mother to be one of six children, or her grandfather to be one of 11. Swapan, the handsome boy she would often see riding his bike to work, and whom she later married at 16, had six siblings – the seventh did not survive childhood. But times have changed, says Ms. Gain, who is now 58 and lives with Swapan in a one-bedroom apartment nearby. Of the couple’s three adult children, only two have decided to have children of their own. They both stopped at one. “One child feels lonely,” she says.

In 1950, India’s population was 360 million. The average woman had six children, about the same number as the American woman had a century ago. Today, with a population of 1.45 billion, India represents one-sixth of humanity. It will overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023 and continues to grow. But the total fertility rate, which is the number of births a typical woman has over her lifetime, has fallen to 1.9 (see Chart 1), below the level needed to keep the population stable over the long term. Although the population will continue to grow for a while, as the generation now children become parents, future contraction is inevitable unless the fertility rate rises again above 2.15. In practice, it will likely continue to decline, accelerating the impending downturn. In Delhi, for example, the total fertility rate is 1.2.

Baby sweatshirt

The rich world and many middle-income countries are overwhelmed with anxiety about declining fertility rates, shrinking labor forces, and impending or increasing population declines. Politicians often pester or bribe parents to have more children, but with little success. Now India, once a source of concern about rapid population growth, is joining the same club. The new textbooks, due to be published this summer, will warn of dangers faced by too few children, not too many. Last May, Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, a southern state with a population of about 55 million, announced a payment of 30,000 rupees ($315) to couples who have a third child.

In 2019, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, warned of a “population explosion.” But the government’s thinking has reversed, says Sanjeev Sanyal, Modi’s adviser. Today, officials worry that India is on a similar path to China, whose population has been shrinking since 2021. Fertility has fallen more and faster than expected, says Neelkanth Mishra, chief economist at Axis Bank. In both Tamil Nadu, a state with a population of about 77 million, and West Bengal (100 m), the total fertility rate is 1.3, the same as in Finland (see Chart 2). The urban average in India is 1.5. For a long time, demographers believed that poor northern states would retard India’s demographic transition. They now appear to be converging on the wealthier, less crowded parts of the country.

Some may see the shrinking population as a blessing. After all, India’s infrastructure is often inadequate: think of passengers crowding Mumbai’s local trains, for example. However, the prospect of a decline in the number of children in India is not entirely comforting either. They will grow old before they become rich, making the demographic transition difficult. The effects will spread across its society, economy and politics.

India’s extraordinarily fertile land and largely reliable monsoons help explain why India accounts for 2.4% of the world’s land mass but 18% of its population. Its population was given an additional boost by medical advances in the late twentieth century. In 1950, a quarter of children did not survive to their fifth birthday; By 2000, only a tenth of young people had died. India experienced this shift in mortality at an unusually early stage of development, when birth rates remained very high, says Sonaldi Desai of the University of Maryland.

This combination has made India the number one population concern. It was a visit to a “hellish” slum in Delhi in the 1960s that inspired Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist, to write The Population Bomb. He warned that the battle to feed humanity had been lost and that India was on the verge of famine. He was completely wrong, but very touching. His actions constituted a disgraceful campaign in the 1970s to limit population growth, during which Indira Gandhi’s government forcibly sterilized some 10 million men.

Subsequent governments, whether led by Gandhi’s party, the Congress party, or the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have largely enacted policies that enable family planning and reproductive choice, says Poonam Mutriya of the Population Foundation of India, a think-tank. In the 1990s, fertility decline accelerated, as more girls went to school and the country became richer. Kerala, a southern state of 36 million people with a total fertility rate of 1.3, has been closing schools and importing workers for decades. Other places are catching up.

The United Nations still expects India’s population to continue growing until the 2060s and then slowly decline. This is based on a huge assumption: that fertility rates will stabilize starting tomorrow. But there are only a few countries in the world where fertility rates declined and then rebounded. “There is nothing natural or inevitable about a rate of two,” says economist Dean Spears. Rukmini S. points out: From India Data Foundation, a think-tank: “There is no sign of stabilization yet.”

Demographers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) have produced more reasonable forecasts. It shows that India’s population peaked during 21 years and then declined sharply as it rose. By the end of this century, India’s population will be just over a billion, a contraction of about half a billion. (The UN also issues high and low growth forecasts; low forecasts are similar.) Another model developed by S. Irudaya Rajan, the Indian demographer, expects India’s population to peak in the 2050s – a little later than the IHME, but much closer than the UN – before rapidly declining.

Few experts expected this, for several reasons. The first is the scarcity of data. The last complete census was conducted in 2011. Follow-up is now late, but the wait has forced demographers to correct data from other surveys, which may have obscured the speed of the decline.

Another factor that puzzles demographers is India’s relative poverty. GDP per person at purchasing power parity was only $7,000 in 2020 when fertility fell to the replacement rate, the level at which the population will stop growing in the long run. This is much lower than in most countries that have crossed this threshold (see Chart 3). “Back in the day, in Demography 101, we used to know that countries reach a certain level of per capita income, women get educated and join the labor force, and then fertility declines,” says Jesús Fernández Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania. But fertility is now It is also low in many poor countries.

In some ways, India’s trajectory reflects what evidence has long shown: that by far the most important factor for fertility is whether girls are girls.

“We go to school,” says Lant Pritchett of the London School of Economics. Those with at least some education enjoy a greater degree of independence, and over time this results in fewer children. India’s fertility decline now reflects a significant rise in girls’ school enrollment rates since the 1990s. If a country is able to provide education to girls at an earlier stage of development than usual, it appears that fertility will begin to decline earlier as well.

But India’s experience also runs counter to some conventional wisdom about fertility. Conservatives in Western countries often attribute the decline in fertility there to the decline in marriage and the increase in the proportion of working women. It’s true that many Western women complain that they end up having fewer children than they would have liked, because the difficulty of balancing family and career (or finding the right partner) means that they start having children relatively late in life.

Cruiser wives, not cruiser mothers

However, India, where more than 90% of women are married and only 33% work, is also seeing a decline in fertility. Although childbearing is occurring a little later than in Ms. Gain’s day, the average Indian woman still marries at 19 and has her first child at 21 (see Chart 4). In other words, age and professional occupation cannot be responsible, at least in the case of India. In fact, even with declining fertility, surveys suggest that Indian women want fewer children. In many states, the desired fertility is about 1.5 children. The majority of women are sterilized once they have finished having children, which indicates that they are not longing for more.

For women across the country, having fewer children has become a powerful cultural norm. The traditional Indian wedding blessing says: “May you be the mother of a hundred children.” But the attitude of modern Indian parents can be likened to an ancient story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Sage Agastya asks his wife Lopamudra whether she wants ten good sons or a great son who is as great as all ten combined. Lopamudra chooses the super son.

There are three factors that explain this shift. The first is the change in the aspirations of contemporary Indian parents. A typical explanation comes from Sanjini Raman, a 42-year-old mother in Chennai. She says she and her husband decided: “All our resources should go to one because if it were two they would be divided.” The cost of sending her daughter to a private school and paying for additional lessons is about 3.5 thousand rupees ($3,650).

Demographers call this the “quality-quantity trade-off,” and it dominates conversations among Indian couples. Ms. Raman says that most of her daughter’s classmates belong to families with one child, which is common in southern India. The proportion of Indian children in fee-paying schools rose from 31.7% in 2015 to 38.8% in 2025. This trend is not limited to wealthier states. Surveys in Bihar (one of the poorest states in India, with a population of 130 million) and Uttar Pradesh (the most populous, with a population of 240 million) indicate that many poor parents choose to have just one child so that they can afford at least some private tuition fees.

The second factor that discourages many children is the decline in the tradition of living in an extended family. In 2001, about half of Indian families lived in homes with multiple generations — grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins ​​— under one roof. Now 70% or so live in nuclear families, according to government data, due to urbanization and changes in the labor market. This makes childcare a greater burden and creates an incentive to reduce family size. But most Indian men don’t seem to notice. “My husband sometimes washes his own plate,” says Kavitha Kannan, a farmer and mother of two from Tamil Nadu.

Pink yes

In the past, as the ancient blessing suggests, another consideration motivated couples: a strong preference for sons. This helped keep the fertility rate higher, because couples continued to have children until they had a boy. But the “boy preference” has decreased significantly: data shows that many Indian parents are satisfied with the girl.

Third, even if educational and family structures shape parents’ thinking, they are reinforced by culture. Having fewer children has become an aspiration, shaped by changes in technology and access to information. A study found that the spread of cable television in villages in the 2000s led to a decline in the number of pregnancies, which the author attributed to soap operas depicting middle-class urban women with small families.

Smartphones – which have become ubiquitous, even in poor villages – could have a similar ripple effect. There is not yet sufficient evidence that its spread has accelerated fertility decline. But smartphones are likely to help spread cultural norms more quickly. In Nagipur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, women say they watch a lot of videos depicting small families and discussing how difficult it is for young men to find jobs. Mr. Rajan likens declining fertility to a “contagion”: “What happens in Kerala ends up in Bihar,” he says.

All of this is already leading to smaller families and paving the way for population shrinkage, which is indisputable. The only question is to what extent fertility will decline. Some demographers suggest that strong marriage and childbearing norms would act as a buffer, sparing India a severe birth drought as seen in South Korea, for example. Others turn this on its head, claiming that it is remarkable that fertility has actually declined to this extent despite these standards. They predict that in the coming decades more Indian women will choose not to marry and have children altogether.

Even if India does not become South Korea, the speed of its demographic transition will have far-reaching consequences. Obviously she will grow old before she becomes rich. In Kerala, where nearly a fifth of the population is over 60, the government has just set up a department for aging. The state has the most comprehensive social safety net in India, but despite this, only 19.4% of the workforce belongs to any type of pension scheme (the national figure is 12%). Providing care for the growing number of elderly Indians seems elusive.

However, the decline of the extended family undermines the assumption that children will care for their parents in old age. In southern India, world-class, affluent nursing homes are emerging. In rural areas, more basic forms of care for the elderly are emerging, centered around yoga and gossip. But families unable to find or afford care, especially those with serious illnesses such as dementia, may have to move back together. Cases of abandonment by elderly relatives are increasing at mass gatherings, such as the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage.

Pressures on family ties are exacerbated by another trend: the boom in internal migration. Southern states have long relied on labor from the North and East, especially in hotels and restaurants. But migrant flows are increasing, providing workers for factories and care homes, among other jobs. At the Atholya Care Center in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, almost all the staff are young women from the state of Odisha. Attracting immigration will leave more elderly Indians in The village. Some affected parents are already taking to social media to reprimand their absent children.

A more rapid demographic transition means that the share of India’s working-age population may peak by 2030. India’s labor force could continue to grow even as the population ages because many working-age people are underemployed. In the long term, the economy will need to better tap women in particular, says Axis Bank’s Mishra.

Demographic concerns already infuse politics. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party likes to raise fears that Hindus (about 80% of the population) will be overrun by Muslims (about 15%). Although fertility among Muslims is indeed higher, it is also declining rapidly, the difference mainly because Muslims are poorer. However, in February, Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the RSS, a massive Hindu nationalist social organization, urged patriotic Indians to have three children to help “stabilize the population.”

Meanwhile, southern states are concerned that Mr Modi will “punish” them for their low birth rates by reducing their seats in parliament. There may also be tensions between internal migrants and the countries that adopt them. Most Southern politicians realize that immigrants boost the economy, but there is some grumbling about the influx of strangers who do not speak the local language. It is easy to imagine that the North-South divide is becoming more fraught.

By now, we expect politicians of all stripes to look for policies to promote childbearing, like Naidu. However, evidence from around the world suggests that tips and advice will not work. Fertility appears to be driven by forces that are too powerful for states or religious leaders to control easily. Rajan points out that fertility in India has been declining for 70 years. The chances of a sudden reversal are slim.

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