Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

Sign Up

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Population Control Is Back in India

India now has the world’s largest population—and is trying to find ways not to.

By Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

Shoppers crowd at a flower market on the eve of 'Gudi Padwa' or the Maharashtrian new year in Mumbai on April 1, 2022.

April 28, 2023, 11:32 AM

A minister in the northeast Indian state of Nagaland last year called on Indians to contribute to a sustainable future by refusing to have children and joining his self-declared “singles movement.” “Let us be sensible towards the issues of population growth,” Temjen Imna Along tweeted, “or #StaySingle like me.” Meanwhile, growing numbers of Indian millennials are deciding against having children for environmental reasons.

Neither development quite amounts to a mass movement. In Indian society, staying childless by choice is still unfathomable for most people. But they are data points of a growing realization among Indians about the problem posed by their country’s population, which is now the largest in the world.

The United Nations has stated that by the end of this month, India’s population will hit almost 1.43 billion and exceed that of its economic and strategic rival China, long the world’s most populous nation. India, however, will have a tougher time than China providing for the bulge, since it is three times smaller in landmass and almost six times behind in GDP.

In 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that a large population was obstructing India’s development. “We have to think if we can do justice to the aspirations of our children,” he said. “There is a need to have greater discussion and awareness on population explosion.”

The new status has sparked a debate in India about whether it should emulate China’s population control policy and create a central law that allows the government to legally, and punitively, enforce a maximum number of children per couple. Some members of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are pushing for a two-child policy (not quite China’s former one-child rule) and say that a centralized effort is required to control population numbers.

For instance, BJP member Ashwani Dubey appealed to India’s Supreme Court to mandate government enforcement of a two-child rule, under which those who obey are offered concessions, such as easy loans, and those who do not are denied such benefits and banned from government jobs. The court stated it could not address all issues and that such social questions fell to the purview of the government, whose duty it is to promulgate laws.

But there is a nagging suspicion among some opposition parties and analysts that the core motivation for population control of at least some BJP members is to further identity politics and deepen the Hindu-Muslim divide before the general elections next year. (The birth rate among Muslims is higher than Hindus overall, but both have declined fast over the years.)

The battle for control of India’s burgeoning population has split the country: There are those who see a large working-age population as a demographic dividend, and those who see it as a time bomb, the undoing of a nation.

India’s working-age population comprises 500 million people and is growing, while China’s population for the first time is on a decline. Some Indian experts believe these people are India’s greatest asset and can fuel India’s growth, catapulting it from a developing nation to a developed one. They point to a recent surge in international companies shifting their manufacturing from China to India and suggest that Indians could take jobs in countries with aging populations.

SY Quraishi, a former Indian civil servant and the author of The Population Myth, has said that Indians are “the CEOs of the world,” presumably in reference to Indian bosses at Google and Microsoft, and that Indians abroad are “the source of an economic revolution that gives back 90 billion dollars in remittances.”

Others who hold a more pessimistic view say that while it is true that Indians have done well abroad, a large number are still employed as blue-collar workers, seeking jobs outside India because of a dearth of employment at home.

They posit that the Indian government is already finding it hard to provide quality education, jobs, and health care to the masses, which are all essential to unleashing the potential of a population. Skeptics say the aspiration that the state can invest much more in human development overnight is, at least at this stage, just an aspiration. Furthermore, they point to a growing population’s burden on natural resources—soil, water, air, the overall environment—at a time when global warming ails the world.

(According to an Oxfam analysis in 2015, the world’s richest 10 percent contributed 50 percent of annual global emissions; and studies have shown that a large population does not necessarily translate into high greenhouse gas emissions. But it is undeniable that as numbers of consumers in India grow there is bound to be an impact on the environment.)

Indian statisticians and experts who have been directly working on population control seem to have settled at least one debate: There is no need for a law to enforce a two-child norm.

The last Indian census was held in 2011, but recent surveys have unequivocally established that, while the Indian population has gone up, the fertility rate has drastically gone down across religions. On average, Indian women are already having only two children in their lifetime.

As per data from the fifth and latest National Family Health Survey, for 2019-21, India’s fertility rate has dropped to 2.0, or two births per married woman. Experts say this is below 2.1, the replacement level of fertility, or the rate at which a generation replaces itself. According to the Sample Registration System survey conducted yearly by the Indian government, the birth rate declined steadily from 2011 to 2020.

Aparajita Chattopadhyay, professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, said, “India’s coercive population policy was not successful in the last century”—in reference to forced sterilization in the ‘80s, which resulted in uproar against the government. To impose a two-child policy now, when fertility rates are on a decline, is “preposterous,” she said.

Chattopadhaya told Foreign Policy that the government should focus on high-fertility districts in overpopulated states instead. “There are certain districts where the growth rate is relatively higher,” she said. “We need to understand—why so.”

The Indian government has identified 146 high-fertility districts, and most are in the north Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. These states have low education and health indicators and are labelled as BIMARU states, or the sick states of India. In comparison, in states in southern India, such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where governments have adopted a holistic approach to population control and paid attention to overall human development, fertility rates are much lower.

Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, told Foreign Policy that in 2017 the Indian government launched Mission Parivar Vikas to “substantially increase access to contraceptives and family planning services,” in high-fertility districts where on average women have three or more children.

Uttar Pradesh, the most populous Indian state, has announced a bill for population “control, stabilization, and welfare” that offers easy loans and tax rebates to people with two children but penalizes those with three or more by denying them access to certain welfare programs. Muttreja described the bill as controversial, and said it proposed “stringent population control measures.”

There has also been mistrust toward the Uttar Pradesh government since the state’s chief minister warned of “anarchy” if one community continued to have more children, resulting in “population imbalance.”

“It should not happen that the speed of population growth or the percentage of some community is high,” Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath said, “and we stabilize the population of the moolniwasi (natives) through awareness or enforcement.” The remark has largely been construed as a cover for old belief among Hindu nationalists that Muslims are deliberately having more children to challenge Hindu dominance.

The insinuation doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, however. Recently Pew Research Center reported, quoting the National Family Health Survey, that every religious group in India has seen its fertility rate fall, including the majority Hindu population and the Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain minority groups. “Among Indian Muslims, for example,” center analysts wrote, “the total fertility rate has declined dramatically from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.4 children in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.”

Chinmay Tumbe, associate professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management, further critiqued the narrative propagated by some Hindu nationalists. “Muslim women in Kerala have fewer kids than Hindu women in Bihar,” he noted over the phone to Foreign Policy.

Not everyone in the BJP supports a two-child policy. Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has told Parliament that population control should not be achieved by force and that the government’s non-coercive policies have delivered.

Tumbe said that India is going though the same cycle of population stabilization that all countries do, but that most developed countries, including China, have already attained. In India the process has been slower. “We are at a particular trajectory purely on account of slow economic growth,” he said.

The good news is that the birth rate has been falling since the ‘80s and will continue to fall, he said. But the catch is that with nearly half of India’s population under the age of 25 and thus of prime child-bearing age, the population isn’t expected to peak until around 2065—even if women have just one or two children.

Indian schools and universities are packed with students, many of whom are unable to get a quality education. Tens of millions of Indians graduate every year, but according to UNICEF fewer than half have the skills needed for a 21st-century job. According to India Skills Report 2022, less than half of Indians are employable and 75 percent of companies reported a skill gap. The Indian government faces a daunting task.

“We definitely need more jobs, but we also need decent jobs that are well-paid and secure with good work conditions,” Chattopadhyay said. Tumbe added that the key was urbanization. Just as China “moved hundreds of millions to cities,” he said, “India needs to do the same.”

Unless the Indian government manages to provide quality education, impart required skills, and create millions of decent jobs, the population surge will most certainly be a disaster rather than a dividend.