India may be the world’s most populous country, with 1.42 billion people and challenges like high youth unemployment, but powerful allies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are championing larger families to counter a declining fertility rate.
Even though the UN projects India’s population would keep rising for about four decades, peaking at about 1.7 billion, some policymakers and Hindu groups say the shift away from smaller families should begin now, including through government financial support.
The nation’s total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of children per woman, declined to 2 in the 2019/2021 government assessment period, down from 3.4 in 1992/1993, due to increasing use of contraceptives and rising education among females. A rate of 2.1 is required for the population to replace itself, the government estimates.
Photo: Reuters
The southern state of Andhra Pradesh, ruled by a coalition of a regional party and Modi’s party, said over the weekend it would offer a one-time cash incentive of 30,000 rupees (US$311.27) for a third child and 40,000 rupees for a fourth, revising an earlier proposal for 25,000 rupees for a second child and no direct support for a first-born. It did not say when the plan would be implemented.
Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu said falling birthrates in many countries were leading to aging populations and economic strain.
“In the past, we worked extensively on family planning,” he said. “Now, given the changed circumstances, we are calling for children to be seen as wealth.”
The small northeastern state of Sikkim has also urged families to have more children, offering incentives such as year-long maternity leave, month-long paternity leave and financial support for in-vitro fertilization.
The UN says that in the mid-1980s, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Turkey all deemed their birthrates too high and tried to bring them down, only to change course by 2015 to promote policies to boost births.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a powerful Hindu group from which Modi’s party emerged, has also called for bigger families, describing it as a priority.
“We say that India is a country of youngsters … but slowly, the TFR is coming down,” RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale told reporters last week. “Demographic imbalances will create tensions.”
India’s overall unemployment rate for those aged 15 and above was 3.1 percent last year, government data showed, but among those aged 15 to 29, it was much higher at 9.9 percent, including 13.6 percent in urban areas and 8.3 percent in rural regions.
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