Демографический кризис в Индии: падение рождаемости и поиск новых экономических стратегий

Sheena Roy has chosen a path where one traditional element is intentionally absent even after 14 years of marriage—a child. While Roy has a younger sister, who has an eight-month-old boy, her husband is an only child. She admits there was a time she leaned toward having children and “debated the idea” with her husband quite a bit. “My husband always knew he never wanted kids. We got married young and because of that we never had this conversation before,” says the 38-year-old Goa-based fitness coach. But as her income grew, so did her appreciation for the time, independence and the little luxuries that came with it. “I decided not to have kids in my late 20s. I never sought out spending time with kids, or with friends and family who have kids,” she says. Perhaps a decade ago, Roy would have been an outlier in Indian society. Not anymore. A country that once feared overpopulation is now beginning to reckon with its demographic mirror image. At the peak of its baby boom, around 2000, roughly 55 babies were born every minute in India. More than two decades on, women in the world’s most populous country are not having as many kids as before—there are approximately 23 million kids born a year in India today or about 44 kids every minute. India’s total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, has fallen to 1.9 in 2026 from 5.7 in 1950, according to recent UN projections. While it took independent India seven decades to lower its fertility rate to the replacement threshold of 2.1 in 2019, it took just six more years to drop below it. The pace of India’s demographic shift is also reflected in its classrooms. School enrolment dipped to a seven-year low of roughly 250 million in 2025. This decline of 1.1 million students from the previous year was directly linked by government officials to falling birth rates. Anisha Sharma, associate professor of economics at Ashoka University, explains that the main economic concern with falling fertility and a resulting ageing population is that, after a point, the country adds fewer young workers to the workforce than it subtracts through older, retired people. “Fewer hands means lower output, lower taxes, lower savings. More retirees means potentially more expenses on pensions, health care and social welfare support,” she says. Fewer births mean that the working age population will shrink with time. But considering India’s fertility decline is simultaneously sitting atop a vast population pyramid, India will have a more staggered transition to an ageing population. Demographers say this window is a crucial opportunity to make the most of the demographic dividend by investing in human capital and supporting childcare infrastructure, work-life balance policies and women’s labour force participation to manage a transition to an ageing population. A flipped script For decades after Independence, India’s biggest population anxiety ran in one direction—too many people, too few resources. Family planning campaigns warned of an overcrowded future. The two-child norm became a quiet social contract. From animated short films to bumper stickers behind trucks and tempos—“Hum do, hamare do” was, and perhaps still is, the most recognisable slogan of India’s family planning drive, that began in 1952. The goal was fewer births. Even sterilisation programmes were aggressively pursued by successive governments. Today, the desire for fewer children persists, but the anxiety driving it has changed. It is no longer just a state-mandated directive, but a deeply personal response to modern day crises. For a journalist with a national daily based in Mumbai, a city which sees frequent flooding and waterlogging due to heavy rains, the climate crisis weighs heavily on her decision not to have kids. For the 39-year-old, the decision not to have kids was also practical. “Economically also it made no sense, it is just unaffordable to have kids,” she says. But though it would be tempting to read India’s falling TFR as a sudden cultural shift—a generation of urban millennials choosing careers over cribs, the decline has been continuous across seven decades, shaped by rising female literacy, falling infant mortality, urbanisation, rising usage of contraception and a gradual shift away from joint family structures. In India’s case, a decline in early marriages has also played a huge part. More than half of the women aged between 20 and 24 years married before the age of 18 in 1992-93 as per the government’s first National Family Health Survey (NFHS-1). By 2023-24 or NFHS-6, the ratio had more than halved to 20 percent. There is also a direct correlation between education and marital timelines. Among women aged 25 to 49, higher levels of education correspond to a later median age for a first marriage. For example, women with more than 12 years of education marry at a median age of 22.8, whereas those with no formal schooling marry at 17. The median age for marriage among Indian women, however, still sits at 19.2 years. Dr Aviva Pinto Rodrigues, clinical director and IVF Specialist at Nova IVF in Bengaluru, suggests that a portion of India’s falling birth rate may not even reflect preference. “We have about 27 million infertile couples in India,” she says. The drivers, she explains, are entwined with the same forces shaping the broader fertility story. Urban women are marrying later, often in their mid-to-late 30s, making conception in these later years more challenging. Demographic dividend However, there is a central paradox in India’s demographic moment, a fertility rate that has dipped below replacement sitting atop a population pyramid so vast and young that absolute numbers will keep rising for decades. The window between these two realities, say demographers, is the most consequential opportunity India has ever had to fully utilise the potential of its working age population before the country starts ageing. A recent study by Population Foundation of India and International Institute of Migration and Development shows that between 2021 and 2051, the country will move away from its characteristically young population toward one marked by slower growth and a progressively ageing structure. As India inches closer to population stabilisation, a point where the population of a region stops growing, the share of children is set to fall sharply while the elderly will account for a far greater proportion. India’s demographic dividend, which occurs when the share of the working age population in a region is significantly higher than that of an ageing population, is likely to peak in 2031 and begin fading after. For some, even these projections might be too conservative. Sharma explains that in the last two decades, fertility and population decline globally have outpaced all demographic projections. “If that is true for India as well, the point of population decline might come even before 2047,” she says. Yet even if that assumption holds true, India maintains a distinct advantage over many other nations. “China’s one-child policy shrunk its demographic transition in one generation, creating a sharp ageing cliff. India will have a more gradual, staggered transition. And we should use that to our advantage,” says Apoorva Jadhav, senior fellow at the Population Reference Bureau and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s South Asia Program. To understand the economic stakes, it helps to think about the dependency ratio or the proportion of the population that is economically dependent, children and the elderly, relative to those of working age. India’s old-age dependency ratio, the number of elderly dependents per 100 working-age adults, currently sits at 11.1, the lowest among major Asian economies. Compare that to Japan’s 51.4, South Korea’s 31.2 or even China’s 21.6. India has, in this respect, a generation of relative advantage still ahead of it. A lower dependency ratio allows more economic resources and higher investment per child in health, nutrition and education. UN projections suggest the ratio will remain below 22 through 2050 before steepening sharply. This is India’s demographic dividend, a structural tailwind that, if properly harnessed, can drive sustained economic growth. Some demographers urge immediate action. “The demographic dividend was never automatic—it was always conditional on converting this favourable age structure into actual productivity gains through health, education and jobs,” says Jadhav. She adds that while falling fertility doesn’t doom growth, it “shrinks the margin for error and compresses the timeline”. For Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Bank of Baroda, a huge number of young people applying for jobs as delivery agents and construction workers, where no skills are needed, is also a sign of caution. “Merely having a large potential working population does not result in dividend, which is the case in India. A large part of this population does not have the right kind of education or skills,” he says. A southeast Asian case study of falling TFR The peer group that India most often benchmarks itself against tells a cautionary story about what follows. Japan saw its old-age dependency ratio surpass 50 percent back in 2022 and shows no sign of reversing. South Korea is expected to hit this milestone by 2037 and China by 2049. These are the economies that let fertility fall without building the social infrastructure to manage what came next. India, however, has a much longer runway—it isn’t projected to cross that 50 percent mark until 2093. V Anantha Nageswaran, chief economic advisor to the Government of India, is measured in his assessment when he says that “the working population will continue to rise for some more time… we still have a window of time before we will face labour shortages. That is not the case yet. So, in that sense we have time to prepare ourselves for the so-called demographic slowdown”. The East Asian comparison weighs heavily on this conversation. South Korea’s TFR in 1970 was 4.46. It dropped below replacement by the mid-1980s, bottomed out at 0.72 in 2023 and has barely recovered. Singapore crossed below replacement in 1977 and now hovers below 1.0. Thailand, which started from a TFR of 6.36 in 1950, higher than India that year, is today at 1.2. All of these countries synchronised their fertility decline with heavy investment in education, export manufacturing and skills formation. They got rich before they got old. India, by contrast, is ageing faster than its income growth. “India hasn’t gotten as rich to take care of that subsequent ageing population,” Jadhav notes. The cautionary tale she reaches for is Latin America, which saw falling dependency ratios in the late 20th century but failed to convert that into sustained prosperity because of deep inequality and limited human capital investment. “I worry that we’re going to fall down that path versus the [path of the] more productive East Asian tigers.” What lies beyond India’s fertility number is not uniform. TFRs in Sikkim, Goa, Jammu & Kashmir and Chandigarh have plunged below 1.5, according to NFHS-6, levels associated with Japan or South Korea. Twenty-two more states and Union Territories, from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to Maharashtra, Gujarat and Delhi, sit between 1.5 and 2.0. Only Bihar and Meghalaya remain above replacement. Southern states like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are already confronting the fiscal and political consequences of early ageing. They have older populations and slower-growing workforces. Kerala is in fact the first Indian state to introduce an elderly budget for 2026-27 at ₹46,236.52 crore, roughly a fifth of the total state budget, to establish supportive institutions for the elderly, financial assistance mechanisms to boost purchasing power of senior citizens and launch specialised entrepreneurship programmes. “Forty percent of term deposits are held by senior citizens, which means there is a large amount of spending power. But this holds for higher and middle-income groups. For the lower income people, there is dependency on family members which comes in the way of consumption,” Sabnavis explains. But beyond individual financial constraints, the broader state infrastructure is equally unprepared. Sharma identifies the crux of the challenge when she says, “We have a narrow window of a couple of decades in which we can make investments in old-age care and social pensions. Our public health care system barely supports our population right now.” What matters in the near term is managing the transition through skilling, internal mobility and keeping labour markets open. “Relatively labour-scarce states or states which have much lower population growth rates can pursue capital-intensive growth,” says Nageswaran, adding that higher fertility northern states should double down on labour-intensive services and manufacturing. And while India has a larger window to avoid the pitfalls of its peers, for the long term, it is essential to invest in human capital to sustain economic growth. Preparing for an ageing future Demographers and economists say that a realistic strategy to sustain economic growth involves investing in skills formation and matching them to actual market demand. This means creating formal jobs at scale, raising female labour force participation, building a social welfare infrastructure—including pensions, old-age health care and formal support structures—before the dependency ratio turns unfavourable. And to deal with declining birth rates, it is essential to have structural fixes rather than cash incentives. Unlike the family planning initiative of early 1950s, India does not yet have a formal policy framework to curb falling birth rates. But some states have pivoted toward pronatalist policies. For instance, Andhra Pradesh now offers ₹30,000 for a third child and ₹40,000 for a fourth, including a monthly child support of ₹1,000; and ₹15,000 per child for school support. While this approach replicates pronatalist models in South Korea, Japan, and Hungary, the evidence of success is grim. South Korea has spent an estimated $300 billion on baby bonuses, childcare subsidies, tax breaks and generous parental leave since the mid-2000s when its TFR was at 1.1. But it continues to remain below 1. No country has, so far, reversed that trend through financial incentives. This is because cash transfers only address the affordability of children at the margins, says Isha Doshi, a 38-year-old former employee in the influencer marketing industry. “For people whose decision not to have children is structural, driven by long-term affordability or simply not wanting kids, incentives like these don’t change the calculation.” Demographers and economists also advise treating infertility as a public health issue, not a private shame, and avoiding fertility targets, cash bounties or any policy that places the burden of demographic recovery on women’s bodies. Why then, do states pursue such policies? “Pronatalist cash incentives are politically easy, they’re visible, they’re fast to announce, they could even be popular compared to the slower, more expensive structural fixes that the evidence actually supports—childcare infrastructure, work-life balance policy, women’s labour force participation,” Jadhav says. “We can think about that as the main goal rather than thinking about some sort of golden number that’s going to solve all our problems if we reach a certain fertility level,” she adds.