Спад рождаемости в Индии до 1,9 ребенка на женщину ускорит рост энергопотребления

In the 2000s, India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) hovered around 3.3 children per woman. Today, the demographic transition has accelerated faster than many demographers predicted. According to the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report 2024 released recently, India’s TFR has dropped to 1.9, falling below the global replacement level of 2.1 required to maintain long-term population stability. While the urban TFR has plummeted to 1.5, rural India has reached 2.1, reflecting a widespread socio-cultural adoption of smaller family norms across all economic strata. The most immediate structural result of this decline is the shrinking of household size, transitioning from traditional joint families to nuclear households averaging four or fewer members. While conventional wisdom suggests fewer people per household should reduce consumption, economic geography and behavioural science tell a very different story: smaller families consume more per capita, particularly across goods, services, and energy. When a population reorganises into smaller units, the efficiency of scale is lost. Consider housing and durables, two households of two people require two refrigerators, two washing machines, two air conditioners, and double the kitchen appliances compared to a single household of four. Multiplier effect This phenomenon, often termed household fragmentation, creates a distinct multiplier effect on demand. Demand for individual housing units expands faster than total population growth, driving the energy-intensive production of cement, steel, and glass. Per-capita ownership of appliances surges, inflating base-load electricity demand for urban power grids. Smaller family units rely less on shared transit and favour personal multi-wheelers and compact vehicles, lifting transport fuel usage. The shift in dietary and cooking habits provides a striking example of how smaller households alter energy intensity. In larger families, home cooking yields massive economies of scale, a single burner prepares a meal for six or seven people with minimal per-capita fuel consumption. In contrast, smaller nuclear households increasingly shift toward convenience foods, meal deliveries, and dining out. This shift is greater in families which have dual income and often are pressed for time. This habit switch carries a significantly heavier energy footprint. Commercial food ecosystems rely on cold chains, multi-stage processing, intensive refrigeration, high-temperature industrial heating, single-use packaging, and last-mile delivery transport. Furthermore, commercial food supply chains incur higher rates of systemic food wastage. As a result, the hidden embedded energy, combining fuel and petrochemical feedstocks of a restaurant meal or frozen dish, is multiple times higher than that of a traditional home-cooked meal. Global trends As India moves through this demographic evolution, shrinking family sizes will serve as a structural engine for the consumer economy over the next several decades. This trend is not unique to India; it mirrors the economic trajectories of several nations during their high-growth phases. South Korea (1980s–2000s) experienced this when their TFR plummeted from 2.8 in 1980 to below 1.2, average household size shrank rapidly. Concurrently, household electricity consumption rose by over 7 per cent annually throughout the 1990s. The expansion of single and two-person households directly fuelled a boom in convenience retail, processed food manufacturing, and residential power consumption per capita. Japan (1970s-1990s) experienced such rise in smaller household units long before its total population peaked. This structural shift triggered an explosion in the 24/7 convenience store economy and ready-to-eat supply chains, driving up industrial food-processing and refrigeration energy requirements by over 40 per cent in two decades. The shift toward smaller households in India too will elevate baseline demand across consumer durables, real estate, personal mobility, and prepared food services. Rapid urbanisation which is not only making cities larger but is also converting rural into rurban, is fuelling the consumerism much faster than expected. Because every element of this ecosystem relies on energy, whether as liquid fuels, power grid capacity, or petrochemical feedstocks, India’s ongoing demographic transition will keep energy demand trajectory sharply elevated long before overall population growth plateaus. The writer is former Additional Director, Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), MoPNG & Former Chief General Manager, HPCL. Views expressed are personal Published on August 12, 2026