Why India’s Falling Birth Rate Is A Cause For Alarm

In recent days, India’s declining birth rates – something that is officially measured through a country’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) or the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime – has drawn much interest, with everyone from demographers and population experts, international publications, and even Elon Musk having a thing or two to say about it. The reason behind this was the government releasing the Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2024, which estimated that the country’s TFR has now fallen to 1.9. This is well below 2.1, the TFR at which a country is able to maintain its current population level, and close to other developed countries that have been worrying about its shrinking birth rates and graying population for some time.

This new development might come as a surprise to those who grew up in India where for decades the government and international bodies pushed people to have fewer children, creating a fear that a population explosion would tip the country into penury. But now the most populated country in the world is witnessing a decline in its birth rates. The effects of this fertility decline will not be immediately visible, given the sheer number of youths in India’s population right now, but, population experts estimate, it will start becoming visible in another 15 to 20 years.

The new report has some interesting findings. While a few states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have a high TFR (at 2.9 and 2.6, they count for the two highest in the country), others like Delhi (1.2), Kerala (1.3), Tamil Nadu (1.3), West Bengal (1.3), Maharashtra (1.4), Andhra Pradesh (1.4), Jammu & Kashmir (1.4), Punjab (1.4), Himachal Pradesh (1.5), Karnataka (1.5), and several others are witnessing a big dip.

It may be tempting to look at these figures and think this is a result of the success of some states – especially in the south – in implementing family planning programmes and in improving their social indices. This is often the argument offered when explaining why the southern states are witnessing a big dip in birth rates. But in reality, something far more interesting seems to be taking place. The northern states might have a higher TFR than the national average, but these states are also witnessing a dip compared to the past, albeit at a slower rate than the south. However you slice the data in India, either urban or rural, south or north, or even based on religions, the TFR is declining across the country.

This ties in well with what is happening globally. India is not an outlier. Birth rates are declining across the world today. According to some estimates, more than two-thirds of all countries today have TFRs below the replacement rate. It isn’t just the developed world or middle-income nations, but increasingly even poorer countries. This includes, according to a recent article in The Economist, countries like Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Morocco and others.

The declining birth rates in India is seen as a conundrum globally. For long, sociologists have tended to explain the fall in birth rates in the developed world by pointing to the fall in marriages, reduced religiosity, women choosing to have children later in life and a growing female work force. But Indians remain religious, marriages are near-universal here, women still tend to have most children in their early 20s and women’s participation in the work force remains low. What then could explain this trend of declining birth rates globally? The economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, who explored this subject of depopulation in their 2025 book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, write in their book that this subject of low birth rates are too big a subject to offer tidy explanations or a singular theory to explain it away. “...nobody—no expert, no theory—fully understands why birth rates, everywhere, in different cultures and contexts, are lower than ever before,” they write in their book. But what they do suggest is how the concept of a decision – whether to have a child or not, or when to have one, or how many to have, or even what will such a decision cost me – something most parents in the past would probably not have considered, will have something to do with it.

“For many of our ancestors on the path up the [population] Spike, parenting might not have felt like much of a decision at all—it was part of a life. But it’s a decision now. Because it’s a decision, people will be thinking about the benefits and thinking about the costs. They might not use those exact words, unless they happen to be economists. But they’ll be weighing the consequences implicitly when they ask themselves: What do I want to achieve with my life? What do I want to be in my life? As long as options compete with and crowd out each other (which is to say, always), people will consider opportunity costs,” they write.

There are good reasons to be worried about declining birth rates. An ageing population could be a big drag on any economy. There are concerns that this could happen in India too, that the country will get older before it gets rich. We may still have a demographic dividend, the so-called economic growth opportunity that comes from having a working-age population that is larger than those who depend upon them, but that this will now begin closing sooner. Several states in India have already begun responding to the fall in birth rates by trying to incentivise couples into having more children, even subsidising IVF treatments and tying up promotions and salary hikes in government jobs to having more children. These attempts will probably have little effect given how such incentives have failed elsewhere in the world.

What could instead be attempted is to stabilise this decline by reducing the costs women bear on having children and improving the general living standards in the country, while also trying to cushion the impact of an ageing population on the economy by boosting healthcare so that older citizens can live longer and healthier, and also lead more economically productive lives. These are tougher to pull off, but might be the only way ahead.