In the early 1970s, the world population had risen to around 3.8 billion. This was the time when population explosion began to take shape as one of the defining anxieties of the age. It was being invoked alongside nuclear war and environmental catastrophe as one of the great threats to humanity’s future.
Just a few years earlier, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) had crystallised the mood, warning of a future of famine and ecological distress. American presidents were warning that unchecked population growth threatened economic development. Intellectuals like science-fiction giant Isaac Asimov gave the idea a powerful cultural weight.
Back in India, the Indira Gandhi government saw rapid population expansion as a big threat to development and attempted to accelerate family planning. During the Emergency, a sterilisation programme led to coercion, abuse and a massive political backlash, and ultimately contributed to the Congress’ defeat in the 1977 election. The poor were disproportionately targeted, and there was a particularly deep memory of the campaign among sections of the Muslim population.
That memory matters today because India has largely completed the demographic transition that policymakers once feared it would never achieve. Government data puts India’s total fertility rate at 1.9 children per woman, below the conventional replacement benchmark of 2.1. Bihar, at 2.9, remains the major outlier, while Uttar Pradesh (UP) stood at 2.6. These are also among the poorest states in terms of per capita income. This correlation has an important role to play in the ongoing shift in India’s demographic narrative.
Some of the states most worried about falling fertility are precisely those that have long depended on workers from higher-fertility states to keep their factories, construction sites and cities running. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, for instance, now have fertility rates far below replacement, while Bihar and UP remain substantially higher. Although the worker arriving from elsewhere is economically necessary, their arrival can also become a source of cultural anxiety.
The politics of fertility has acquired another dimension because of the coming delimitation of parliamentary constituencies. States that succeeded in controlling population growth now fear that their demographic restraint could translate into relatively fewer seats in Parliament, while states with larger populations stand to gain greater representation. That’s why they are either devising or contemplating schemes to incentivise having more children. Therein lies the problem.
India has become a country in which women are increasingly defying societal pressures and making their own choices.
For one, no state or community should want to erect demographic walls or make prosperity exclusive to themselves. The Constitution makes India a Union of States and gives citizens the right to move, reside and work anywhere in the country. Once a state begins to distinguish between Indians on the basis of birthplace, language or inherited identity, and treats fellow countrymen as outsiders, the premise of the nation takes a hit. It stinks of a distinctly racial logic. A country founded on common citizenship cannot simultaneously tell its citizens that they belong everywhere and that, in practice, some parts of India belong more to some Indians than to others.
Our cities are already buckling under congestion, pollution, housing shortages and overstretched infrastructure to absorb the population. India is struggling to provide a decent quality of life to those who live here. In 2025, it ranked sixth among 143 countries for annual PM2.5 pollution, with concentrations nearly 10 times the World Health Organisation guideline. Around one in three Indian children under five is stunted, reflecting chronic undernutrition. And even after years of expansion in schooling, Annual Status of Education Report 2024 found that only 44.8 per cent of Class V children in government schools could read a Class II-level text. All this in a country whose nominal gross domestic product per capita is around $2,800, ranking among the bottom quarter of 190-plus countries. A population contraction is the least of our problems.
Moreover, India’s population, currently around 1.46 billion, is projected to grow for several decades despite fertility having fallen below replacement. The United Nations’ latest projections put India at about 1.69 billion by 2054, after which growth is expected to slow and the population to peak at roughly 1.7 billion in the early 2060s. Thereafter, India’s population is projected to decline, reaching around 1.5 billion by 2100, still leaving it the world’s most populous country throughout the century. In effect, we will remain the bustling republic that we are.
A Matter of Choice
Given India’s developmental constraints, is it really good policy to spend scarce public money to persuade couples to have children? The evidence in the Outlook-Toluna Survey on motherhood suggests otherwise. Women across the country do not see cash handouts as the answer. In the South specifically, when asked for their No. 1 policy priority that may prompt them to have another child, education and health care were selected by 38 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, compared with just 12 per cent for cash transfers.
Among women who could be persuaded to reconsider having a child, 53 per cent said better finances or job security would matter, while 47 per cent pointed to greater support from partners or family, 39 per cent to affordable housing and 36 per cent to workplace flexibility or leave. Government incentives were cited by just 33 per cent.
The economic rationale is not hard to see. Andhra’s new population-management framework proposes a Rs 25,000 incentive for the birth of a second child, Rs 30,000 for the third and Rs 40,000 for the fourth. Is a scheme like that really going to convince women or couples to have more children? Unlikely, especially in the South where such amounts are a small fraction of the per-capita income. At present, Karnataka’s per-capita income is about Rs 3.86 lakh, Telangana’s around Rs 4.2 lakh, Tamil Nadu’s Rs 3.62 lakh and Andhra Pradesh’s Rs 2.95 lakh. Keralam’s is around Rs 3.08 lakh.
A Question of Opportunity Cost
The message is clear: today’s educated urban woman is not waiting for a cheque to decide whether to become a mother. She is calculating whether she can afford the education, health care, housing, child care and career costs that come with raising a child. In essence, what emerges broadly is a picture of women making fertility decisions not in isolation, but as part of a larger calculation about the kind of life they can provide their children, and the price they themselves may pay in the process.
That nuance matters. For many women, having another child is not simply a question of desire or affordability; it is also a question of opportunity cost. As the fertility debate rages, we must not miss this important takeaway. We have become a country in which women are increasingly defying societal pressures and making their own choices. They are exercising their agency. Perhaps the most important thing the fertility trajectory tells us is not how far India has fallen, but how far it has come. That can only be a good thing for India in the long run. And, by extension, for the world as well.
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Neeraj Thakur is editor, Outlook
