Children in these still atypical but growing one-child families appear to be highly advantaged. They (boys as well as girls) are more likely to be sent to private schools, more likely to attend English medium schools, more likely to be aided by private tuition to supplement school learning, than their peers from larger families. At the same time, our results also suggest that the declining relevance of public schooling and increasing reliance on private education in India may be actively pushing the emergence of one or two child families. We propose that a narrative that sees the first demographic transition to replacement fertility as being distinctly different from the second demographic transition to below replacement fertility sits uneasily onto the experience of very low fertility in contemporary India.
The votaries of population control got a big boost immediately after Narendra Modi returned to power in May 2019. During his Independence Day speech that year, the prime minister raised concerns over India’s “population explosion”, underlining the need for greater discussion and awareness on the issue. According to 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, at its current growth rate, India’s population will surpass China’s by 2027 to become the world’s most populous country. Though Yogi Adityanath did not name any specific community or religious group, his critics were in no doubt who the target was. “This policy is pure political fingerprinting,” says Congress Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor. We have seen this in Assam where they are concerned about certain migrant Bengali Muslims.
Against National Population Policy 2000
Most state leaders remain silent, even in regions where fertility rates are falling. Think about how much talent and productivity is trapped inside households. In contrast, in urban areas, women’s labour force participation is nearly half of what it is in rural areas, and fertility is also much lower. A simple mind would say women in cities are neither working nor having children.
- Most state leaders remain silent, even in regions where fertility rates are falling.
- For all work, i.e. combining work on family farm, caring for livestock, and work in family business and wage work, women with a single child are actually less likely to be employed than women with larger families.
- According to 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, at its current growth rate, India’s population will surpass China’s by 2027 to become the world’s most populous country.
- Although age at marriage is slowly inching up and the proportion of women who married before age 20 has declined from 58% in 2006 to 47% in 2012, the average age at marriage is still very low, only 21.2 in 2012 (Government of India 2013).
Politics dominates the proposed two-child norm in Uttar Pradesh
- The two-child restriction, it is argued, goes against the essence of the National Population Policy (NPP) 2000 and international covenants to which India is a signatory and which emphasise the rights of individuals and want family planning measures to be adopted voluntarily by them.
- Men in India hardly opt for contraceptives such as sterilisation or even condoms because of the cultural perception that birth control is not a “masculine” thing.
- In contrast, Assam and West Bengal with TFRs of about 2.2 have 10–12% families who appear to have stopped at one child (on this regional variation, but using census data, see also Pradhan and Sekher, 2014)6.
The fertility rate across Indian states has fallen without coercive measures as family incomes increased and women were educated, IndiaSpend reported in August 2016. Socioeconomic-factors, education, modernisation, access to contraceptives, and state policies for development, all affect fertility, as we wrote. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the overpopulation issue of India and propose recommendations on how to overcome it.
We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition. Data from the Health Ministry’s most recent National Family Health Survey, released last week, showed India’s total fertility rate had dropped to 2.0, below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. In urban areas it was even lower, with an average of 1.6 children per woman. Examples from countries such as Thailand and Bhutan show that providing more choices in birth control to women can help increase contraceptive prevalence rate significantly.
China’s population grew older and richer: policy lessons for some African countries
Odisha introduced the two-child restriction for Zilla Parishad in 1993 and for panchayats in 1994. Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh introduced the policy in 2000. Chhattisgarh, which came into being in 2001, inherited the law from Madhya Pradesh. The two-child norm was adopted by Assam in 2017 and by Uttarakhand in 2019. Both countries are struggling with the legacy of harsh population policies, and stricter population controls in India could have disastrous consequences for women and minority communities. Enacted in 1992, the Odisha Zilla Parishad Act also prohibits people with more than two children from holding any post in panchayats and urban local bodies.
(d) Aspirations for Social Mobility and Family Size
What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. The only way to control population of this scale is to enable one child policy. This will make sure only one child of the family gets access to government services like aadhar card, ration card etc.
What’s more, constructed into much of these policies are rewards for households to have simply one kid. And in 2021, a senior federal government minister proposed a nationwide “one-child” policy. After the starting of individuals’s Republic of China in 1949, baby death dropped substantially. In Between 1950 and 1980, China’s population practically doubled. The “one-child policy”– restricting births per couple through coercive steps– was carried out in the early 1980 s, and fertility dropped drastically. That is why broad policy prescriptions like “having more children” do not make sense for a state like Bihar.
All these are violative of the commitments made at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, he added. The Union government further said in the affidavit that India was a signatory to the World Conference on Population and Development’s 1994 Plan of Action, which was against taking coercive measures to control population growth. Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, said the incident from Madhya Pradesh underlines the possible adverse consequences of coercive population policies. “Such rules create fear, stigma, and perverse incentives, pushing individuals to take inhumane steps to safeguard their livelihoods. We have seen similar outcomes in States that enforced the two-child norm, including desertion of wives, concealment of births, unsafe abortions, sex-selective abortions and even abandonment of infants,” Muttreja said.
From the India Today archives ( India’s population policy: Myths and reality
The Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that the two-child policy is constitutionally valid. Rather, it is a disqualification conceptually devised in the national interest.” China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition. Urban, middle-class couples face mounting one child policy in india financial pressure, including the cost of raising children and of caring for the elderly. Women in India today are having fewer children than their mothers had. But despite a lower fertility rate, the country’s population is still growing.
“It is extremely short-sighted of policymakers to resort to such coercive approaches. Data indicates that there is a secular decline of the birth rate in all communities in the country, indeed sharper among Muslims. Hastening this would require investments in health and nutrition, ensuring better child survival,” Rao said.
National Population Policy (NPP) 2000
Children from one-child families are 1.56 times as likely to be in a private school as children from 3+ child families, while children from two child families are 1.4 times as likely to attend private school. Both these relationships are significant at the 0.001 percent level. When we interact being a single child with the gender of this child, the relationship is even more intriguing (tables not reported here).