If a significant cultural transformation and renegotiation of gender roles must precede below replacement fertility, this appears to be far in the future for India, particularly in the populous north-central states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar (Desai et al, 2010). According to a study by Gustafson (2014), the one-child policy has led to a significant decrease in the availability of family caregivers for the elderly in China.210 So, tens of millions of retirees now only have one child to rely on for care. This has led to an “inverted pyramid”, in which two sets of elderly parents must rely on a single married couple of two adult children (each of whom is an only child with no siblings), who in turn have produced a single child on whom the family must eventually rely on in the next generation. As in China, in some states in India, women’s education and their aspirations for their children have contributed to lower birth rates. China will for the first time allow couples to have a third child in a further relaxation of family planning rules five years after a “two-child policy” largely failed to boost birth rates.

Potential social problems & “little emperor” phenomenon

• Whether smaller families are causes or consequences of this thirst for child specific investments, the fact that the main substantial differences we see in familial lifestyles for different parities are those observable for child outcomes is highly significant.
• NFHS-III documents that about half the women aged 40–44 have four or more children.
• With the one-child policy in place, many parents often chose abortions to meet the one-child standard as well as for the satisfaction of having a male son.233 Male offspring were preferred in rural areas to ensure parents’ security in their old age since daughters were expected to marry and support their husbands’ family.
• Both are more likely to invest in children’s education than larger families but parents of a single child are even more invested in this child than families with two children.
• But the policy has brought its own set of challenges to one of the world’s biggest economies, which has had a declining youth population for years while the proportion of the population over age 65 has risen from about 4% to almost 10%.
• What all this suggests is that this very low fertility is largely an expression of the same (although stronger) motives for fertility decline in general.

This is a nationally representative sample of 41,554 households and interviews with 33,583 ever-married women aged 15–49. The sample is spread over 1503 villages and 971 urban blocks in 33 states and union territories. Unlike the National Family Health Surveys, the IHDS is not primarily a fertility survey but contains extensive data on income, employment, structure of family life and investments in children, allowing us to test some arguments about differences in family lifestyles in families with different fertility patterns. At the same time, deeper analysis of fertility and mortality statistics from IHDS compare well with NFHS-III conducted around the same time (Desai et al. 2010). The value of education is particularly high among the Bengali speaking populations of West Bengal and parts of Assam.

Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”. What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. At other times, the single-child family is a subject of interest for countries with very low fertility. But for countries like India, in which fertility has been high until recently, there is little interest in families that might imitate the very low fertility behavior of China and Eastern Europe (for an exception, see Pradhan and Sekher 2014). As happened at the height of China’s one-child policy, Indians could lose government jobs and more if such laws were passed at the national level. Modern research from the West indicates that growing up without siblings puts a child at no intellectual, social or emotional disadvantage.

“Robust investments in prevention, palliative care, and social infrastructure are urgently needed to look after the ageing,” says Mr Goli. Urbanisation, migration, and changing labour markets are further eroding traditional family support – India’s strong point – leaving more elderly people behind. This exercise will redraw electoral boundaries to reflect population shifts, likely reducing parliamentary seats for the economically prosperous southern states. As federal revenues are allocated based on state populations, many fear this could deepen their financial struggles and limit policy-making freedom. With nearly 1.45 billion people now, you’d think the country would be quiet about having more children.

Intimate partner violence and low birth weight in Colombia

If one member of the couple goes under the knife for voluntary sterilization, the family could get a range of benefits including tax rebates, subsidies for home purchases, and receiving cash back on their power and utility bills. India must also leverage its demographic dividend better – economic growth that occurs when a country has a large, working-age population. Mr Goli believes there’s a window of opportunity until 2047 to boost the economy, create jobs for the working-age population, and allocate resources for the ageing. “They fear being penalised for their effective population control policies, despite being better economic performers and contributing significantly to federal revenues,” Srinivas Goli, a professor of demography at the International Institute for Population Sciences, told the BBC. India’s fertility rate has fallen substantially – from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to the current rate of two. Although marriage ages have risen, this increase is nowhere near as rapid and to as high ages as in East Asia.

aspect of economic life

• The one-child policy was managed by the National Population and Family Planning Commission under the central government since 1981.
• For people in the United States especially, the idea that society’s long term interests could ever be more important than individual rights was anathema.
• Requiring a child limit is usually successful in lowering the fertility rate but is also controversial and hard to mandate (especially when other strategies to lower the population exist).
• As a result, would help slow down the exacerbating global warming and the consequences that come with it.
• Kerala reached the milestone in 1988, Tamil Nadu in 1993, and the rest by the mid-2000s.

But a rate of 1.6 or lower could trigger “rapid, unmanageable population decline”. In this paper we consistently show predicted values from multiple regression or logistic regression for outcomes of interest. These regressions control for woman’s age, education, place of residence, caste, household income and a dummy indicator for the state of residence. The results are predicted using STATA MARGINS command, holding all other variables at their mean value separately for urban and rural residents.

In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking. In the 1960s and 1970s, neo‐​Malthusian panic about overpopulation overtook eugenics as the primary motivation behind coercive policies aimed at limiting childbearing. Neo‐​Malthusian ideas spread among senior technocrats and government leaders in some developing countries, resulting in human rights abuses that Western development professionals encouraged and that Western aid often funded. Those abuses peaked in the form of China’s one‐​child policy (1979–2015) and India’s forced sterilizations during its “Emergency” (1975–77), a period in India when civil liberties were suspended and the prime minister ruled by decree. The one‐​child policy saw over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions.

Comparisons with Very Low Fertility in Europe

In contrast, current theories of the second demographic transition might one child policy in india apply much more powerfully to the situation of increasing and voluntary childlessness. In other words, intentionally giving up on childbearing altogether might reflect entry into the kind of post-modern world that Van da Kaa (1986) describes much more strongly than does choosing between stopping at one rather than two children. With the one-child policy in place, many parents often chose abortions to meet the one-child standard as well as for the satisfaction of having a male son.233 Male offspring were preferred in rural areas to ensure parents’ security in their old age since daughters were expected to marry and support their husbands’ family. The one-child policy was managed by the National Population and Family Planning Commission under the central government since 1981. The Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China and the National Population and Family Planning Commission were made defunct and a new single agency, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, took over national health and family planning policies in 2013. China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition.

The Indian economy has begun to grow rapidly, but unlike China the decline in fertility has been uneven, and states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (total fertility rates of 4.4 and 4.8) remain mired in poverty. However, there is great deal of similarity between East Asia and India in the increased resources needed to raise a child with a satisfactory potential future. In a society in which intergenerational expectations continue to be bidirectional, rearing such a child also means a marked rise in parental status and fortunes and, to that extent, the one child family is certainly an indicator of sharply rising social and economic aspirations. A more interesting but also more ambiguous geographic distribution arises when we look at state level differences in the proportion of one-child families in Table 5. It appears that the highest levels of the one-child family exist in the Southern and Eastern (as well as the northeastern) parts of the country. Lest one thinks this is merely a consequence of lower average fertility in the South, it is interesting to compare state total fertility rates with the proportion of one-child families.

Limitations and gaps

Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”. What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. Both countries are struggling with the legacy of harsh population policies, and stricter population controls in India could have disastrous consequences for women and minority communities. A 2011 study conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) indicated that close to 10% of Indian households now opt for only one child, and nearly a quarter of college-educated women said they would prefer to have a single child. It was a source of great pain for one generation, but a generation later it began to yield important economic benefits.

Experts estimate India will surpass China in just a few years, according to the United States Census Bureau. As early as March 2022, reports circulated on Chinese social media that India’s population had already surpassed China’s, though this was later dispelled by experts. India will surpass China as the country with the world’s largest population in 2023, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 report.

At the same time, a greater desire for leisure as well as greater intimacy in conjugal relationship might nevertheless motivate couples to have smaller families. These aspirations are difficult to measure within a survey and we make no claims that the results presented in this paper provide an exhaustive analysis of the possible linkages between leisure, conjugal intimacy and family size. This it seems unlikely that it is unlikely that a higher commitment to the work force is a motivating factor for women to have very low fertility. Note that had we found a relationship between the one child family and women’s labor force participation, we could still not have established the temporal supremacy of the work-family or family-work linkage. But the absence of this relationship suggests that role incompatibility is unlikely to be an important motivating factor in families restricting themselves to one child. Before we speculate about the reasons for an apparent increase in the popularity of the one child family in some segments of the population of India, we need to establish that this is a real phenomenon and that it reflects a conscious and deliberate choice.

Private school enrollment and reliance on private tutoring have increased sharply in recent years (Kingdon 2007). These conditions may force upwardly mobile parents to restrict childbearing in order to invest in the education of a single child. Parental aspirations for children and social mobility have existed through the ages.

NFHS-III documents that about half the women aged 40–44 have four or more children. In the predominant patriarchal culture, when individuals can have just two kids, the stress on women to deliver male kids will grow. Given Australia’s growing ties to India, it should be concerned about what population policy could mean for the erosion of democratic norms in India. But B. Paswan, head of the department of population policies and programmes at the International Institute for Population Sciences highlighted the proposition is simply not realistic. The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk population policies. Given Australia’s growing ties to India, it should be concerned about what population policy could mean for the erosion of democratic norms in India.