Oct 25, 2024 08:35 PM IST
The solution is not to ask women to have more kids; a better idea might be just to accept an inevitable reality and prepare for it.
The chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu want women to have more children. In the past week, both N Chandrababu Naidu and MK Stalin expressed their concern over their state’s ageing demography and have publicly called for a reversal in this decline.
I have news for them: Women do not need to be lectured to by politicians, especially male politicians, on the number of children they ought to have. We are not walking wombs who reproduce (or not) to further national, or, in this case, state interest. It is simply not our cross to bear and is as repugnant as Right-wing parties asking Hindu women to have more kids because “Hindu khatrein mein hain.”
The southern discomfort with falling fertility rates is not misplaced. Tamil Nadu has a total fertility rate — the number of children a woman is likely to have — of just 1.4; in Andhra Pradesh, it’s 1.5, well below the 2.1 required to maintain a stable population.
The policy implications of a greying population are wide-ranging. Greater public spending on age-related health issues, for instance. Less central allocation of funds and resources disbursed to states according to population numbers. A truncated workforce of working-age adults will also mean a loss of potential tax revenue in state coffers. All this is the state’s problem to solve. But to publicly ask women to have more children is “foolish and unacceptable,” says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “It risks undermining progress in women’s autonomy, gender equality, and population stabilisation.”
Declining fertility cuts across India where fertility rates have fallen from 3.4 to 2.0 between 1992 and 2021. If you add to this longer life span, 60+ citizens will comprise 19.5% of the population by 2050, up from 8.6% in the 2011 Census. Only five states, with Bihar leading at 3.02, still exceed the replacement rate of 2.1. Another 31 states and Union territories have achieved replacement fertility rates. The numbers validate what demographic experts have been saying all along: Development is the best contraceptive.
It’s a lesson that is being played all over the world. After its notorious one-child policy, China is now literally begging women to have three children at least. South Korea with the world’s lowest fertility rate of 0.78 declared a “national emergency” in May this year and announced a slew of incentives including cash, flexible work hours, and extended parental leave.
In India, the elephant in the room is the delimitation exercise that will determine how many Members of Parliament (MPs) each state is allotted based on its population. States with more people get more MPs. States that have curbed population growth through development and an improvement of indices including mortality and education will get fewer seats. A 2019 paper by Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson for the Carnegie Foundation estimated a future Lok Sabha could have 848 seats with UP alone getting 143. Kerala, on the other hand, would stay at just 20.
It’s good that politicians are already looking ahead for solutions to a time when India too will join the rest of the developed world in grappling with a declining population. The solution is not to ask women to have more kids; a better idea might be just to accept an inevitable reality and prepare for it.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender.The views expressed are personal
Get Current Updates on…
See more
