Politicians in India have attempted for years to institute a China-based population control model on the country’s citizens. Now, a new report from the Population Research Institute (PRI) has revealed that the Jansankya Samadhan Foundation (JSF), an NGO, used the occasion of World Population Day to call for a two-child policy to be put into place. PRI’s president calls the idea “nonsensical” due to the country’s current fertility crisis — and even one of the country’s largest fertility chains is raising the alarm.
“The population controllers never give up,” said PRI President Steven Mosher. “Foreign-funded NGOs have been calling for India to adopt a two-child policy for years. But this latest call is particularly nonsensical. The country’s 2020 National Family Health Survey showed that India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is now below 2.0 children per woman. This is well below the 2.1 children needed to maintain a stable population.”
Damage has already been done
Despite this danger, efforts to curb or control births in India have already been unofficially implemented. The New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF) claims India’s nearly 1.5 billion people “put[] pressure on resources and services, leading to environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality,” and place extra burdens on “healthcare,” on “education infrastructure,” and employment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on Indians to have fewer children for the sake of the country’s future, while districts (BIMARU states) with higher fertility rates, lower literacy rates, and lower education rates are considered “sick.”
Far more extreme than the population control efforts currently in place in the United Kingdom — where couples who give birth to more than two children are excluded from receiving certain government benefits for those additional children — JSF wants children in India born over the two-child limit to be deprived of birth certificates, and their parents punished with up to 10 years in prison, and/or the loss of their government employment.
But even without such coercive policies in place, damage has been done. A strong cultural preference for boys has led to skewed sex ratios, and an estimated 13.5 million girls have been killed in sex-selective abortions from 1987 to 2016. Women have also been subjected to mass sterilization camps, or pressured into having needless hysterectomies.
Falling fertility rates
Though India is the most populous nation in the world, it may not remain that way for much longer. Fertility rates in India, as in the rest of the world, are plummeting. A Lancet study has predicted that the total fertility rate (TFR) in India will fall to 1.29 by 2050, much lower than the 2.1 rate needed to replace the current population. This is a far cry from its peak in the 1950s when the fertility rate was over 5.0 per woman.
Professor Anjali Radkar, head of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy and dean of academic affairs, said this outcome was planned and expected due to decades of encouraging people to have fewer children, beginning in 1947 when the country gained independence from the United Kingdom. “During that time, the system required a lot of effort to change the mindset of the Indian population,” she said. “Slowly that behaviour change started showing up. Infant mortality declined substantially (because of various maternal and child health-related programmes and successful immunisation) meaning child survival was guaranteed. Small families became the norm.”
And, Radkar said, this could have results similar to what China is already beginning to experience: catastrophic consequences for a country with a large, rapidly aging population and nowhere near the number of births needed to support it.
“By 2050 the share of senior citizens in India will be more than 20 per cent, that is one [in] five people,” Radkar said. “This is what China is already showing signs of as a consequence of the one-child-family policy.”
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Dr. Ajay Murdia of Indira IVF noted that infertility is also becoming an increasing problem. “According to some estimates, about 27.5 million married couples are actively trying to conceive and are suffering from infertility. But only about 275,000 IVF cycles are performed every year,” he said. “This silent epidemic, affecting one in six couples, is rapidly evolving into a national emergency with far-reaching consequences for India’s societal structure and economic prospects.”
IVF is likely not the answer to the potential demographic crisis; after all, other nations have tried to encourage people to have more children by subsidizing various family programs and fertility technologies to no avail. Ultimately, decades of government propaganda did its job in India, China, and elsewhere, with generations of people raised to believe that having children is a negative. Reversing that mindset will not be easy.
“This isn’t just about individual families, it’s a looming demographic catastrophe that threatens India’s economic growth and social stability,” Murdia said. “While India currently boasts a demographic dividend with a young population, the rising infertility rates coupled with an ageing population could lead to a scenario similar to other Asian countries struggling with inverted population pyramids. In the coming years, these factors could create a perfect storm that may irreversibly alter India’s population dynamics, potentially leading to an ageing crisis that the country is ill-prepared to handle.”
