However, the position contrasts sharply with that of Congress MLA Bawa Henry, who on July 3 pushed for a two-child policy in Punjab. Henry introduced a private member’s bill proposing population-control measures, including fines and the revocation one child policy in india of voting rights for couples who exceed the limit. These policies are not simply legacies of a less enlightened time, however.
These calls have less to do with demographic reality and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility. Despite decreasing birth rates, some political leaders have actually promoted for the adoption of something like China’s previous one-child policy in northern states with big Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with group truth, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist issues around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility. Typically, underdevelopment is linked with higher fertility because fewer babies survive, so people tend to have more children.
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The key is striking the right balance between population control and keeping the pace of economic growth. Infant mortality rate (IMR) also plays a key role in determining the inclination towards family planning. “Often more children are conceived because the chances of survival are low,” says Choudhuri.
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There is little doubt that we need newer and more nuanced research paradigms than the ones informed by earlier understandings of population rhetoric. We need to understand the emerging familial configurations of third-party donor families facilitated through IVF, commercial surrogacy and bride-shortage related marriage migration and inter-generational care deficit among the many other social phenomena that are resulting from newer demographic trends. The number of people living below poverty line is 22% of the population in India (United Nations).
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Many people who are concerned about India’s fast-rising per capita emissions certainly like the sound of it. Earlier this year, India’s pre-budget economic survey declared that per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will increase by nearly three-fold to 3.5 tonnes by 2030. From time to time, it has been suggested that if India implemented the one-child policy, it would have a marked benefit for the country. While the government has encouraged “high quality” urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children. As in China, in some states in India, ladies’s education and their goals for their kids have actually added to lower birth rates.
ii. Increasing voluntary childlessness and very low fertility
The decline in population growth rates for Jains (20.5 per cent), Buddhists (16.7 per cent), Sikhs (8.5 per cent) and Christians (7 per cent) was even steeper during the same period. Like past population-control policies, they are targeted at Muslim and lower-caste families, and illustrate a broader Hindu nationalist agenda with anti-democratic tendencies. Four Indian states with big Muslim populations have actually currently passed variations of a “two-child policy”.
Additionally, with crucial generational shifts posing a threat to the earlier stability of marriage and child-centeredness, reproduction and reproductive processes are provoking yet newer moral and cultural anxieties. Resulting familial, kinship and policy shifts are paramount in the ways in which China and India are approaching reproductive technologies and demographic transformation. Here, cultural peculiarities are beginning to provide new forms of engagement with the decades-long state, research, and policy obsessions with population.
How feasible is One Child Policy for a country like India and at what point does it become a necessity to implement it?
In a society where son preference is so prevalent, the two-child policy is widening the sex ratio at birth. The two-child policy was conceived in the 1990s as a response to the population count arrived at under the 1991 census. In 1992, the National Development Council set up a committee headed by the then Chief Minister of Kerala, K. Karunakaran. The panel recommended in its report in 1993 that legislation be passed by Parliament banning individuals with more than two children from holding any elected office, from the panchayat to the Parliament. It was also not implemented in Karunakaran’s own State, which instead focused on improving education and health services. Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”.
In 1994, India was a signatory to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, which concurred that population stabilisation could be achieved by addressing the education and literacy levels. Finally, in April 1996, the targets-based approach was abandoned and substituted by a decentralised approach with a focus on community needs and health rather than demography. The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), introduced in 2005, strongly link the voluntary family programme with adolescent, maternal, and child health. The National Planning Policy (NPP) 2000 laid down meeting the unmet need for family planning as its immediate objective and stabilising the population as its long-term goal.
Resources & consumption
I think it is important to understand that there are different driving forces, which is why income, when you look at it by itself, or affluence, or wealth, GDP per capita, that is just one overriding metric. So one factor is income levels because the need to have more children goes down. The general global pattern is that fertility rates decline after countries become affluent, as seen in South Korea and Japan. However, India is something of a partial exception to this trend. The United Nations Population Fund’s recent State of World Population 2025 report points out that fertility rates are falling across the globe. “The fertility decline in India is happening at a relatively lower per capita income level,” says Ravi.
- We have shown that holding income and education constant, families at different parity levels do not differ substantially in women’s labor participation, how much they consume or the amount of time they devote to pursing individual activities.
- While most experts agree that a burgeoning population places pressure on India’s resources, particularly in urban areas, they assert that the country is heading towards population stabilisation, both with and without the help of government-initiated population control measures.
- That is why they enforced a policy telling people not to have more children.
- Compared to Pakistan, China has a larger geographical area and a larger population.
- These states have barred people with three children from contesting civic polls apart from other disincentives.
- In both India and China, these population policies had unintended consequences.
What if India has enacted a one-child policy like China?
- TFR is the number of children, on average, born to each woman in the country during her lifetime.
- If you just have a fever, there is no reason to rush to a super-speciality hospital.
- But it is time we had a dedicated national survey focused on migration.
- For those who did not comply, however, it proposed they should be barred from accessing other government-sponsored welfare schemes, contesting local elections, applying to government jobs, and, most shockingly, have limited access to food rations.
The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk population policies. The idea the country should adopt something like China’s former “one-child policy” has been moving from the fringe to the political mainstream. In 2018, the Supreme Court held that the birth of a third child would automatically disqualify a person from contesting panchayat polls and from being a member or sarpanch. Gujarat also amended the local law in 2005 to disqualify anyone with more than two children from contesting elections for bodies of local self-governance — panchayats, municipalities and municipal corporations. Under the panchayati raj laws in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, if a person had more than two children before May 30, 1994, they will be disentitled from contesting elections.
Our contention is that in modern India, the nature of economic development in recent decades has had much to do with the growing recourse to very low fertility that is the subject of this paper. For one marker, the index measuring frequency of discussion between the couple, women with a single child in fact have a lower level of couple communication, suggesting that children possibly form an important topic of parental conversation and increase rather than decrease conjugal intimacy. While our markers of personal freedom are indeed superficial and may be subject to considerable measurement error, it is interesting that for none of these four markers do we see a large and substantial improvement in personal freedom with smaller families. However, the centrality of the conjugal unit as a motivating force for a single child is not supported by the data. The prevalence of nuclear families among households with one, two, or more children is about 50% in our sample. This contradicts the expectation that intergenerational relations are less central to family functioning in the single child household than they are in higher fertility homes.