Hailing from a small village in Keralam, Niyathi and her husband had to delay their plans to start a family because the two of them were living alone in Gurgaon. Niyathi became a mother at the age of 38 after she shifted back to her home state. “Those were important years of our career and we could not risk our planning. Now, we are at a stage in our career where we can easily switch and work on our terms,” she says, after moving back to Palakkad in Keralam as regional head of a marketing firm. Today, even if both the parents are busy at work, their child, now a six-year-old, is safe with either the paternal or maternal grandparents.
For 29-year-old Priya, things are more complex. She lives in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, with her husband and their two-year-old daughter Rahi. With a working mother-in-law who stays in Kanpur and her own parents settled abroad with her brother, she is left alone almost always to take care of the child. “My in-laws and parents visit us but only for a few weeks. My husband and I take turns to take care of our daughter. We also have financial commitments so we have to continue with our jobs,” she says.
What separates Niyathi from Priya is not their career ambition or their desire for children, but who they have around them when raising their child. Across India, more women are taking on paid work, but that has not meant they have stopped wanting children. What has changed is the world surrounding motherhood.
As families have become smaller and young couples have moved away from family homes, the informal support system that once absorbed much of the work of raising a child has thinned out. At the same time, long working hours and limited access to affordable child care have left nuclear couples with fewer people and fewer hours to share the load.
The Outlook-Toluna Survey of 1,334 women is telling in this regard. A majority—about 64 per cent—of them said that they live without their extended families. And an even bigger share of the respondents, about 89 per cent, felt that having the grandparents or extended family around eases the burden of raising kids for working parents.
In India, a common question asked to almost every woman who wants to have a career or already has one is: “If you go to work, who will take care of your child?” It can come from anyone: parents, in-laws, partners, even society at large. Buried in the question is the old assumption that as more women enter the workforce, motherhood inevitably takes a back seat and fertility falls with it.
Yet, the apt question may not be whether women are choosing careers over children, but whether families and cities are giving women enough support to do both. In our survey, a staggering 47 per cent of those who are married and yet don’t have a child said that more support from their partner or family could help them reconsider.
The problem, as Sindhuja Penumarty from the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), points out that the barriers to fertility aspirations are “increasingly social and logistical”. In urban India, she said in a social media post, nuclear households, and limited and often expensive child care make it harder for young couples, especially women, to balance work and fertility aspirations. But “in rural India, extended family and community members still actively support child care, which has helped keep the gap lower.”
The Village that Disappeared
Liberalisation in 1991 did more than open India’s markets. It built its cities. With manufacturing and services jobs created, new urban centres pulled the youth from small towns and ancestral homes towards bigger cities. The aspiring youth started building their own lives and livelihoods in these cities and never went back.
For the first generation of migrants, however, support often came from outside the immediate family; from landlords, neighbours and even shopkeepers who knew the children in their neighbourhood. The concept of flats and high-rises was only emerging at that time.
“When I came to Delhi in the early 1980s and became a mother in a few years, my landlady was there to help me along with other women living around us,” says 62-year-old Sadhna, who used to be a freelance writer. “We could safely leave the child with them for a few hours. Even when my children used to play outside, there were people keeping an eye on them.” Now, her daughter has a son and Sadhna spends most of her time taking care of him. “We live nearby and I take care of my grandchild when my daughter is working,” she says. “While we had help from the communities, these high-rises and flat systems have taken away even that comfort for mothers.”
But does having grandparents around really play a role in family planning? It does, at least for Nikhil and Durga Sinha. Nikhil, who is from Bihar, comes from a household where everyone has a government job: his parents, his brother and sister-in-law. While they are all settled in Patna, he opted for a transfer because Durga, a central government employee, had a job in Mumbai. The couple have a daughter and are not planning on having a second child.
The barriers to fertility aspirations are increasingly social and logistical. They are not only economic. — Sindhuja Penumarty
“Taking care of the child takes a lot of time and energy. We leave the house around eight in the morning and come back by seven in the evening. Our daughter is 12 now and can stay at home alone for a few hours. But we still need to manage food, homework and other essentials for school. We have househelp but when they take leave, the load can be a lot. I cannot go through all that again,” Durga says.
But her sister-in-law, who lives in Patna, had her third child last year. “She lives with the family and is not the only caretaker. My mother-in-law is a teacher and by the time the children are back from school, she is also there to supervise them. But we don’t have that luxury,” Durga says. Just like Priya, Durga also cannot expect her mother-in-law to shift with her.
Shamika Ravi, member of the EAC-PM, told Outlook last year that child-bearing and child-rearing are labour-intensive, and the burden falls almost entirely on young women. “How are they supposed to manage without family support? In joint families, mothers actually thrive. In rural areas, because families often include multiple generations, there is someone to take care of the baby. Women can work,” she had said. Her point cuts to the urgency of the situation: this isn’t a private household problem, it is a demographic one.
Women’s employment is often linked to lower fertility, but the relationship is more complicated than a simple trade-off between work and motherhood. On one hand, if female employment alone explained falling fertility in India, rural parts, where more women work, should have fewer children, not more. But the opposite is true. The female worker population ratio shows that for every 100 women in urban India, only about 23 are working, against 37 in rural India. Yet, rural India’s fertility rate remains higher than urban India’s, not lower.
However, National Family Health Survey-6 (2023–24), shows a broad association between fertility and women’s employment across several large states. States where a smaller share of women reported working in the previous 12 months and being paid in cash tended to have higher fertility.
While the popular assumption is that a woman’s motherhood choices are set against her career, rural India shows that the two can coexist. When there is support from an extended family living together or nearby, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive choices.
The Work after Work
For couples living in urban India, the problem is not only how many hours they spend at work, but how little time remains once commuting, domestic work and care giving are added. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023–24, workers in urban India put in an average of about 48 hours a week, compared with 40 hours in rural India. According to the International Labour Organisation, long hours of work (more than 48 hours per week) have a negative effect on workers’ work-life balance.
Disproportionate Burden of Care
For women, especially working women, the burden of care falls almost entirely on them in a society like India. According to the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey-2024, women aged 15–59 who participated in unpaid domestic work spent an average of 305 minutes, more than five hours a day on it, compared with 86 minutes for men. Women who participated in unpaid care giving spent another 140 minutes a day on it, against 74 minutes for men. Together, that is 445 minutes or more than seven hours a day of unpaid domestic and care-giving work. That burden sits alongside women’s participation in paid employment, making the question of how working parents divide time particularly consequential.
A NITI Aayog working paper, “Girls and Women at the Centre”, released this June, found that this disproportionate unpaid load creates what it called “time poverty” among women, restricting their ability to acquire skills or take up paid work in the first place. A separate NITI Aayog study on India’s care-giving ecosystem, released in August, traced the mechanism directly: informal care giving by family members, mostly women, remains the backbone of care in India, even as rising female labour-force participation, urbanisation, migration and the shift from joint to nuclear families steadily shrink the pool of family members available to provide it.
Shweta Mendiratta, director and unit head for obstetrics and gynaecology at Yatharth Hospital, said in a social- media post that young Indians are not “anti-family”, but urban life increasingly leaves couples without the support systems that once made raising children easier. She pointed out that urban life leaves no room for a support system.
“Joint families are rare,” she says. “Most young couples live in nuclear setups with limited child-care help. The idea of ‘doing it all alone’ feels overwhelming. The question isn’t ‘why aren’t young people having kids?’ It’s ‘what kind of world have we built that makes parenthood feel unaffordable, unsupported and unsustainable?’”
The EAC-PM has called for a shift “from maternity-centric to family-friendly policies”, arguing that treating care as a private-household responsibility, especially for women, contributes to low urban female labour-force participation and a widening gap between desired and actual fertility.
The Village that isn’t Coming Back
If a country or society wants and expects women to have more children, it also has to care about the ecosystem around motherhood. That gap between wanting the support and not having it is the argument for where the public conversation on India’s falling fertility needs to move next.
The forces pushing Indian families toward nuclearisation, especially in cities, may not reverse. The phenomenon is tied to jobs, migration and aspiration, all of which will keep pulling young couples toward urban centres and away from the multi-generational home.
As families have become smaller and young couples have moved away from family homes, the informal support system that once did much of the work of raising a child has thinned out.
While speaking about how careers and families can be sustainable together, Radhika Gupta, managing director and chief executive officer of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, says that the countries that managed this relatively better did not solve it through rhetoric. “They built ecosystems: child care, flexible work, shorter commutes, family support systems, organised care infrastructure,” she posted on social media. “For years, we thought of infrastructure as roads, ports and power. In the next phase of India’s growth, child care and care infrastructure may become equally important economic infrastructure.”
Government data reinforces the urgency. The Periodic Labour Force Survey found that 43 per cent of women cite child care and homemaking responsibilities as a barrier to work, and a December 2025 NITI Aayog report quoted Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, on women still leaving the workforce over limited access to child care.
A lot of conversations about India’s falling fertility eventually circle back to women’s choices. Instead, it may be time to focus on how policy and society at large can ensure that the missing infrastructure of child care is solved. This in turn will help ease the pressure of making women choose from the binary of career and kids.
Even though the village that helped raise a child for generations is shrinking, the work that it entails hasn’t gone anywhere. Someone still has to do it. Indian women are just finding it harder, every year, to find it.
(Some names have been changed to protect privacy)
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
Nivedita Singh is senior correspondent, Outlook
