Fewer Than One Billion Indians
Falling fertility rates and preferences mean India's population will peak sooner than expected. By the end of the 21st century, there will likely be fewer than one billion Indians.
The population of India is thought to have surpassed China’s in April 2023, making India the world’s most populous country with a population of over 1.4 billion people.1 This is more than the combined populations of North America and Europe. This huge population, together with the country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and significant regional military influence, has led many, over the decades, to predict that India will become a global superpower rivaling China and the United States. Despite long-term economic underperformance relative to China and other high-growth East Asian countries, India is often heralded as a potential global economic powerhouse due to its relatively youthful population and lowered fertility, resulting in a lower dependency ratio and an expected economic “demographic dividend” from the higher ratio of productive working-age people.2 The median age as of 2023 is 29.5 years old, compared to 38.5 in the United States and 39.8 in China.3
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The total fertility rate, at 2.07 children per woman, is very close to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman—much higher than China’s rate of 1.09 or the United States’ rate of 1.66.4 The highest projections predict over 2 billion Indians by 2100, with India remaining the most populous country in the world, perhaps followed in the rankings by African countries like Nigeria. But these figures bely a much less certain future. India’s total fertility rate has fallen rapidly over the last decade and is likely to be well below replacement in the next decade. Indian elites have historically favored population control, and still do, with outright sterilization long being one of the most widespread forms of contraception. Rather than reaching 2 billion people by the end of the century, the population is more likely to peak at 1.5 billion by 2050 and begin falling thereafter, and will plausibly be below 1 billion by 2100.
Despite India’s projected rapid aging and fertility crash, its demographics should not be a barrier to industrialization. Over 70% of the workforce is still rural and over 40% continues to work in low-value agricultural jobs.5 Underemployment is the norm rather than the exception across the Indian workforce, and female labor force participation is still only around 30%.6 This labor reserve numbering in the hundreds of millions is sufficient to drive industrialization if the institutional factors blocking Indian development are resolved. There is also plenty of room for catch-up growth: per capita incomes, adjusted for purchasing power parity, were a little under half of those of China as of 2019.7 But should India successfully mobilize this workforce, industrialize, and become wealthier, all previous cases point to even a further reduction in fertility and as a consequence a much-accelerated graying of the country.
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India’s Population is Likely to Peak Soon
India is something of a demographic anomaly. It has the high marriage rate and early age at first birth of a low-income high-fertility country—the average Indian mother gives birth to her first child at just over 21 years of age—but the lower fertility rates characteristic of much richer nations. Fertility rates in the richest Indian states, such as Goa, are very similar to those in notoriously low-fertility countries such as Japan. India’s low-fertility states are disproportionately in the country’s richer and more industrialized southern regions, while the high-fertility states are typically poorer, more rural, and located in the north.
Bihar, the highest-fertility state, with a total fertility rate of 3.0, fits this description, as does Meghalaya, which has the second-highest at 2.9. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous but second-poorest state, still has a total fertility rate of 2.4.8 Nevertheless, fertility rates across all states have fallen rapidly over the last three decades. In 1993, the fertility rate in Uttar Pradesh was 4.8, 4.0 in Bihar, and even 3.0 in Delhi. Today, Delhi has a total fertility rate of 1.6, comfortably below the replacement rate and close to the fertility rates of the United Kingdom and the United States.9
Indian women have come to accept the idea that the ideal number of children is no more than two. In one survey, 72% of women born after the year 2000 report that their desired number of children is two, and another 19% want either one child or zero. Just 9% of women report wanting three or more children.10 The current “wanted fertility rate” is just 1.6, and is consistently lower than the actual fertility rate across every religious group, every level of education, level of wealth, and caste.11 Ideal fertility was still above 2.5 for women born in the late 1960s, but has fallen steadily since and has consistently been lower than India’s actual total fertility rate, probably due to limited access to contraception, especially in poorer rural areas. In the United States and many European countries, the situation is completely reversed: women consistently report desired fertility that is both above replacement and higher than the actual total fertility rate. In the U.S, for instance, the desired fertility rate is 2.7.12
The social shift to older motherhood and a rising age at first birth that has been characteristic of Western fertility transitions is nowhere to be found in India. In a sense, this should not be surprising: Indian women still have low labor force participation rates and the 2011 census recorded a substantially lower literacy rate among women (65.5%) as compared to men (81.3%). Economic underdevelopment has meant that Indian women have not adopted delayed childbearing in response to rising education levels, greater labor market opportunities, and the availability of fertility assistance technologies such as IVF. In fact, sterilization, rather than purely economic factors, is instead doing most of the work in lowering Indian fertility rates.
Around 3.5 million Indians are sterilized every year, the overwhelming majority being women.13 Vasectomies today are just 1.1% of sterilizations in India, as of 2020-21.14 The most common procedure for sterilizing women, tubal ligation, or having one’s “tubes tied,” is generally considered permanent and irreversible. State governments organize makeshift sterilization camps and also run incentive programs for sterilization, funded in part by the national government. The state of Madhya Pradesh, for instance, pays women undergoing post-birth tubectomy 3000 rupees, about 12 days’ pay for a rural laborer.15 Incentives are higher still in districts with higher fertility. In 2014, sixteen women died at a government camp in Bilaspur after undergoing sterilizations, and such camps continue to operate today despite court rulings ordering the government to cease operating them.16
In the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of sterilizations performed in the year fell to 3.3 million, but the state attributes this decline largely to greater uptake of long-acting reversible contraception methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs).17 These are becoming more popular, especially among more educated women.18 In 2020-21, the last year for which data are available, India conducted 2.4 million sterilizations, a -25% decline on the year before due to the effect of lockdowns.19 Despite this, the number of IUD insertions actually rose slightly in this year.
Declining sterilizations are unlikely to be evidence of a resurgence in high-fertility ideals, but just evidence of adoption of more modern Western contraceptive techniques, which have proven just as if not more effective at preventing births, though they are notably reversible. As India becomes richer, sterilization activity might move away from camps towards hospitals, but efforts to enforce a 2016 Supreme Court ruling that ordered the government to phase out operation of sterilization camps seem lax at best. The conditions in these camps remain low-quality. While national guidance limits the number of sterilizations per camp to thirty a day, there are recorded occasions of over one hundred sterilizations taking place per day.20
Local officials periodically come under intense pressure to ensure that sterilization rates remain high. In 2020, an official circular from the Madhya Pradesh state government threatened the members of its Health Mission with financial penalties or firing if they failed to meet male sterilization targets.21 Financial incentives offered for vasectomies are actually higher now than those offered for tubal ligation, despite the lower risk involved in the former procedure, but uptake remains low. The now-widespread presence of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) across rural villages has been a key tool for promoting female sterilizations. ASHAs are local women who are not paid a regular salary but are themselves financially rewarded per sterilization that occurs in their village. Notably, payments for sterilizations are three times higher than those that ASHAs receive for delivering maternal healthcare services.22
The UN’s “medium variant” population projection projects that India’s total fertility rate stabilizes at around 1.8 by 2050 and falls only slightly thereafter, to 1.7 by 2100. In this scenario, the population would peak at around 1.7 billion before falling back to a little over 1.5 billion by 2100.23 The percentage of Indians aged 65 or older would reach 30% by the end of the century, and older Indians would outnumber those under 25.24 This scenario, however, seems unrealistic in the face of the low fertility desires of Indian women and the potential for further downward pressures on fertility to come into play as the economy industrializes, such as increased secondary and tertiary education access and high female labor force participation rates.
It is much more likely that fertility rates will continue to decline rapidly towards 1. In Singapore and Malaysia, both much higher-income countries, Indians have very low fertility rates—around 1.2—that are very comparable to the fertility rates of ethnic Chinese in these nations.25 In this scenario, India would age much faster and older Indians might outnumber those under 25 much sooner than the UN projects. India’s window to get rich before it gets older is likely to be shorter than currently thought.
The UN’s “low variant” population projections, therefore, are likely more credible. India’s population in this scenario would peak at a little over 1.5 billion by 2050, and fall to under a billion by 2100.26 Even this scenario may be too optimistic. All Indian demographic data is outdated since the last census was undertaken in 2011. The planned 2021 census was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been repeatedly delayed since. Updated accurate estimates of fertility therefore rest on the National Family Health Surveys, which may not accurately sample the population. Previous censuses have been affected by inflated population estimates in at least some states due to local attempts to extract more resources from regional and national governments, a similar issue to that affecting Nigeria’s demographic data.27
Moreover, the total fertility rate is a synthetic measure that extrapolates from present birth rates and previous cohort fertility trends to the projected lifetime fertility of women currently still in the childbearing years. It is not, therefore, robust to changes in the timing of fertility: in a country where the fertility window is expanding and women are shifting towards later motherhood, the total fertility rate will underestimate actual completed cohort fertility. This effect is visible in U.S. data, where despite years of below-replacement total fertility rates, actual completed cohort fertility has been above replacement until very recently.28 In India, however, due to the effect of sterilization, fertility windows are actually declining, so Indian total fertility rates may actually overestimate the completed cohort fertility of Indian women still in their childbearing years. Women born in 1980-84 bore their last child at an average age of just 25.7.29 It appears difficult if not impossible for India’s population to ever reach 2 billion outside of a complete policy volte-face.
One final factor that may serve to keep India’s population growth below even the lower end of mainstream demographic projections is rising involuntary infertility. Secondary infertility is defined as the percentage of reproductive-age women who have given birth before, express a desire for another child, are not using contraception, are in a stable union, and have had no children in the last five years. It has risen from just under 20% in 1993 to over 28% by 2016.30 In contrast, the U.S rate of secondary infertility, by this definition, is around 6%.31 Obesity, which lowers fertility, has increased dramatically in India over the last several decades: 13% of the adult population aged 18-54 were classified as obese by body-mass index in the fifth wave of the National Family Health Survey, and over half were classified as abdominally obese.32
Moreover, rising obesity is likely to interact with other India-specific factors that lower fertility, such as the high prevalence of vegetarian diets. Around 40% of Indians abstain entirely from meat and over 80% consciously limit their meat intake, in accordance with the traditional practices of Hinduism.33 Vitamin B12 deficiency is both extremely common among vegetarians and is also linked to fertility issues in men and women, decreasing sperm quantity and motility in men while increasing miscarriage risk in women.34 Absent a national program for B12 supplementation, natural infertility is likely to increase, in part due to the effects of environmental factors that affect fertility, such as pesticides and industrial air pollution, both serious problems in India across rural and urban areas respectively. On the other hand, meat consumption levels are still very low at just 15% of the global average, but if they rise to match global norms, the health of Indians can be expected to improve considerably.35
The ubiquity of sterilization makes forecasting India’s future fertility rates difficult. In theory, India perhaps has the most room for policy maneuvering to increase fertility rates of any large country: by simply ending government support for mass sterilization, the state could vastly increase the reproductive window of Indian women. Such a policy volte-face, however, seems very unlikely in the face of the popular acceptance of low-fertility ideals and a secure elite consensus in favor of population control.
Indian Elites Have Favored Low Fertility For Decades
The decline of fertility in India has been accelerated by an elite population control consensus dating back to the 1950s. This consensus owed its origins both to the influence of foreign institutions such as the World Bank and the U.S. government, but also to domestic upper-caste elite concerns about lower-caste and Muslim fertility. As far back as 1940, the dominant, socialist-leaning Congress Party’s National Planning Committee, chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru—a high-caste Brahmin, and later India’s first prime minister upon independence—had sponsored a report by Radhakam Mukherjee, another Brahmin, calling for the sterilization of “the entire group of hereditary defectives” and the propagation of anti-natalist propaganda aimed at the lower castes.36
Mukherjee also endorsed the removal of barriers to intermarriage between different elite castes as part of an explicit eugenics program.37 The post-independence National Planning Commission continued this focus, as when in 1951 it received a report from its population sub-committee advocating free sterilization and contraception. The post-independence elite was not immediately uniformly in favor of population control: Mahatma Gandhi opposed birth control, as did Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Sushila Nayar, who were both close allies of Gandhi. Nayar further led the Ministry of Health until 1957. Kura was a Christian and did not share the Brahmin concern with controlling the fertility of the lower castes. Between these divisions and the weak state capacity of the new Indian state, no immediate tangible national commitment was made on the question of population control.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, some local elites took matters into their own hands. In 1959, the chief secretary then-Madras state, R. Gopalaswami, was paying almost a tenth of per capita GDP to individuals for sterilization.38 By 1960, Maharashtra state was hosting camps for mass vasectomies, which were preferred over female sterilization due to the ease of the operation. Explicit demographic targets at a national level, however, did not enter the picture until the Fourth Five-Year Plan from 1969 to 1974, which targeted a reduction in the birth rate from 39 to 32 per thousand population by 1974. Explicit targets for sterilization and copper coil insertions were set, and a dedicated Department of Family Planning was established.
Further impetus towards population control policies was provided by Western elites. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations both backed The Population Council, a non-governmental organization set up by John D. Rockefeller III, which in turn founded the first UN population research center in Bombay in the early 1950s.39 The Population Council’s concerns were more straightforwardly economic than eugenic: it viewed uncontrolled population growth as a threat to the productivity of developing nations. The foundations themselves also worked directly in India: Ford employed seventeen full-time consultants advising the Indian government by 1966.40 Although U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower would not support developing world population control policies openly, fearing a domestic political backlash from social conservatives, President Lyndon Johnson was persuaded of its merits by Robert Komer, his national security advisor, who in turn had been influenced by the work of Stephen Enke, a Ford Foundation consultant.41
Johnson, therefore, initiated a policy of making food aid conditional on domestic political change, including population control. To his aides, Johnson defended the policy, arguing he was “not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”42 The conditionality of aid remained in the face of a severe famine throughout Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 1966. As famine grew in these states, so did contraception uptake, as women grew increasingly desperate to claim the incentive payments available, despite the risks of perforated uteruses and infection from the dirty conditions in which the procedures were often undertaken.43
In this, the United States was assisted by other actors, many of them dependent on U.S. funding, such as the World Bank, USAID, and the United Nations. All employed full-time staff that worked closely with the health ministry on incentive programs for sterilization and IUD uptake. The domestic political appetite for population control, however, also remained high, especially due to the interest of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and Prime Minister from 1966-77 and 1980-84. Gandhi and her son Sanjay implemented a crash mass sterilization program during “The Emergency,” a period from 1975-77 in which civil liberties were suspended and Gandhi was legally authorized to rule by decree. About 8.3 million sterilizations were performed in a year, an increase from 2.7 million in the year prior to the proclamation of the Emergency, most of them vasectomies and many of them coerced.44
The popular backlash against the Emergency-era coercive sterilization program forced subsequent governments to abandon the most violent elements of the scheme, but mass sterilization in camps continued, both of a voluntary and quasi-coercive nature. Over time the focus has shifted towards women, in part a legacy of the Emergency’s focus on male vasectomies. Despite the eugenic and upper-caste elite origins of India’s drive towards population control, there seems to be very little remaining emphasis on raising upper-caste fertility, which has declined along with those of less economically-successful social groups, such as Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. Amidst the sub-sample of Brahmins in successive waves of National Family Health Survey, the total fertility rate has declined from over 3.0 in 1993 to below replacement today.45
The rate of decline, however, is actually lower than that observed in some lower-caste groups like Marathas, a group that draws heavily from the rural peasantry and lower-class tradesmen in Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state. The Maratha fertility rate was over 5.0 in 1993, but was only just above replacement in the fourth wave of the National Family Health Survey, conducted in 2016.46 A similar pattern is observed across other lower-caste groups: although their fertility rates were and are higher than those of upper castes, the rate of decline is somewhat faster and all groups are quickly converging to sub-replacement fertility. While Hindu nationalist politicians have occasionally raised the alarm about the slowly-falling percentage of the population that is Hindu, there seems to be virtually no modern pro-natalist movement amongst India’s upper castes.
Current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is 73 years old and leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has publicly endorsed small families and population control.47 He is himself childless. Modi’s eagerness to secure visa deals in trade negotiations with foreign nations such as the United Kingdom is likely also motivated by his underlying belief that India is overpopulated and this overpopulation serves to constrain its development. The Hindu leadership in BJP-voting states such as Uttar Pradesh have proposed barring persons with more than three children from public sector jobs and limiting the access of such families to welfare.48 Across a number of states, including Modi’s home state of Gujarat, persons with more than two children are legally barred from contesting local government elections. Similar legislation exists in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Telangana.49
Modi’s support for population control, and that of the BJP, is likely accentuated by the fact that the Muslim fertility rate remains elevated and is still above replacement at 2.4, although it has fallen dramatically from 1993, when each Indian Muslim woman had on average 4.4 children.50 Indian Muslims have also had lower child mortality rates than Hindus, a pattern observed over many decades despite their lower average socioeconomic status.51 Perhaps rather than achieving high Hindu fertility to maintain a demographic balance, the standard Hindu nationalist preference has been to achieve low Muslim fertility. Given the difficulty of raising fertility rates, this is likely to remain the preference. Muslims today are estimated to be about 15% of India’s population, up from around 10% in the 1950s.
A Vast Labor Force Remains Despite Falling Fertility
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The “demographic dividend” is the boost in economic productivity in a country with a high proportion of working-age people relative to both young and old dependents. If other factors are favorable, the demographic dividend can be one of the forces that contribute to the industrialization of a poor country like India. Sustained low fertility eventually leads to a high dependency ratio as formerly working-age people become old dependents, and the few young dependents become a smaller cohort of working-age people.
Every major developed country has seen its working-age proportion of population decline for years if not decades: according to the OECD, which defines working-age as between the ages of 15 to 64, the working share in Germany peaked in 1986, in Japan in 1992, and in the U.S. in 2007.52 China and South Korea peaked in 2009 and 2016, respectively. The only major country that is still rising rather than declining is India. While every other major developed country has an elderly share of the population between 15%-30%, India’s share is only at 6.9% as of 2022.53 India’s demographic dividend is expected to peak in 2041 but last until 2055 or so.54
Between the predominantly rural workforce and the low rates of female labor force participation, a large majority of Indians today are either unemployed, not looking for work, or stuck in casual labor with no social security benefits or employment rights. Around 90% of the employed workforce was in this kind of casual labor as of 2018.55 In an economic sense, many of these persons may as well not exist given how unproductive they currently are. Internal migration will therefore ensure, for many decades to come, a large flow of additions to the portion of the labor force doing useful work, a phenomenon that has also defined China’s economic rise.
For comparison the internal migrant population in China is estimated to have reached 376 million.56 With well over a billion people, India most likely has plenty of talent to fill out globally-competitive industrial organizations, even should it turn out not to have as much such talent as, for example, China. India’s enrollment ratio in tertiary education is 32%.57 The country has far more graduates than it has graduate-level jobs for.
The main obstacle to Indian industrialization is rather India’s political economy, which impedes live players and thus slows down the emergence of functional economic institutions and industrial empires. In China, South Korea, and Japan, governments worked closely with industrial leaders and new entrepreneurs to help build domestic companies that could eventually compete globally through better economies of scale, preferential regulatory treatment, technology transfer, and, eventually, clearly superior products. This is what distinguishes these industrial success stories from poorer countries like Mexico, Brazil, or Vietnam, where manufacturing growth has come on the back of foreign industrial empires moving production facilities to those countries, but there has been no concerted effort to support and build domestic industrial empires led by domestic live players, while economic elites are minted through political patronage rather than industrial entrepreneurship.
As a result, India’s industrial trajectory remains uncertain. India has much of the labor market regulation more typical of upper-middle-income and rich countries, such as minimum wages and limits on the maximum number of hours per shift. Legislation such as the Industrial Disputes Act requires employers with more than 100 employees to seek government permission for any layoffs, although enforcement of this and other restrictive regulations is lax at best and varies substantially by state.58 Legacies of the socialist “permit Raj” post-independence era, these regulations are a disincentive to formal labor market participation and firm expansion. There are however some recent moves away from this default: Tamil Nadu’s state government expanded the maximum permitted number of hours per shift from 8 to 12, in response to pressure from Foxconn and other manufacturers.59
The manufacturing share of the Indian economy has grown over time, and now stands at around 30% of GDP by some measures. The overall growth rate has however been fairly weak and employment growth in the sector has been sluggish.60 Indicators such as electricity consumption and power demand reaffirm the impression of real but relatively slow development: the twenty-year average of power demand increase is around 5%, but 2023 saw much higher power demand growth of around 10% for the year.61 This kind of growth is much closer to the historic growth in power demand that China saw during its takeoff years of industrialization, when power demand grew by 13-15% a year. Although it remains unclear if India can shift towards this kind of growth trajectory, demographics will not fundamentally shape the path of industrialization.
Instead, if it happens, industrialization will further reshape the country’s people. The “demographic transition” towards lower fertility rates and older societies as countries become more affluent is unlikely to see an exception in India, which is already seeing declining fertility rates despite being relatively poor. The strong emphasis on education and schooling is likely to further suppress fertility in its own right.62 The country’s vast labor force means that any external correction is unlikely to come anytime soon. Fewer than one billion Indians by 2100 isn’t just plausible, it’s likely. Together with lower-than-previously-expected growth in African countries like Nigeria, and still crashing U.S. and Chinese fertility rates, humanity might have a far less numerous future than has been commonly assumed.
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Sara Hertog et al. “UN DESA Policy Brief No. 153: India overtakes China as the world's most populous country | Department of Economic and Social Affairs,” The United Nations, April 24, 2023, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/publication/un-desa-policy-brief-no-153-india-overtakes-china-as-the-worlds-most-populous-country.
Sophie Malin and Ashima Tyagi, “India’s Demographic Dividend: The Key to Unlocking Its Global Ambitions,” S&P Global Intelligence, August 3, 2023, https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/featured/special-editorial/look-forward/india-s-demographic-dividend-the-key-to-unlocking-its-global-ambitions
“Country Comparisons - Median Age,” CIA, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/median-age/country-comparison.
Liyan Qi, “China's Fertility Rate Dropped Sharply, Study Shows,” WSJ, August 19, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dropped-sharply-study-shows-e97e647f.
Ramesh Chand, “Changes in Labour force and Employment in Rural and Urban India: 2017-18 to 2020-21,” NITI Aayog, December 27, 2022, https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-02/PresidentialAddressProfRameshChand17012023.pdf.
Manoj Kumar and Ira Dugal, “Rising women's participation in Indian workforce likely led by distress, study says,” Reuters, September 20, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/india/rising-womens-participation-indian-workforce-likely-led-by-distress-study-2023-09-20.
Surjit S. Bhalla and Karan Bhasin, “India—China: Reversal of fortunes?” Brookings Institution, September 14, 2023, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/india-china-reversal-of-fortunes.
“Economic Survey 2022-23 Statistical Appendix,” Government of India - Ministry of Finance, https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/economicsurvey/doc/stat/tab818.pdf.
Ibid.
Narae Park et al. “Near-universal marriage, early childbearing, and low fertility: India's alternative fertility transition,” Demographic Research, June 27, 2023, https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol48/34/48-34.pdf.
“India's Population Growth and Policy Implications,” UNFPA India, https://india.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/brief1_-_indias_population_growth_and_policy_implications.pdf.
Melanie Notkin, “Americans' Desire for Large Families Hits 50-Year High,” Institute for Family Studies, September 25, 2023, https://ifstudies.org/blog/americans-desire-for-large-families-hits-50-year-high.
Cheena Kapoor, “Mass sterilizations to curb India's population continue despite regrets,” Devex, April 13, 2023, https://www.devex.com/news/mass-sterilizations-to-curb-india-s-population-continue-despite-regrets-105301.
Family Planning Division, MoHFW, Government of India, “2020-21 Annual Report-Family Planning,” National Health Mission, https://nhm.gov.in/New_Updates_2018/NHM_Components/RMNCH_MH_Guidelines/family_planning/IEC_Material/Annual_report/Annual_report_20-21.pdf.
Antriksh Singh, “50% more incentives for male vasectomy across state,” Times of India, February 16, 2022, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/50-more-incentives-for-male-vasectomy-across-state/articleshow/89613490.cms; Subodh Varma, “As real wages fall, Indian government remains blind to plight of rural labor,” Peoples Dispatch, February 12, 2023, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/02/12/as-real-wages-fall-indian-government-remains-blind-to-plight-of-rural-labor.
Dinesh C Sharma, “India's sterilisation scandal,” World Report, The Lancet, December 16, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)62224-8.
“Family Planning Annual Report - Year 2019-20,” National Health Mission, https://nhm.gov.in/New_Updates_2018/NHM_Components/RMNCH_MH_Guidelines/family_planning/IEC_Material/Annual_report/Annual_report_19-20.pdf.
Anjali Bansal et al. “The trends of female sterilization in India: an age period cohort analysis approach,” NCBI, July 5, 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9254500.
Family Planning Division, MoHFW, Government of India, “2020-21 Annual Report-Family Planning,” National Health Mission, https://nhm.gov.in/New_Updates_2018/NHM_Components/RMNCH_MH_Guidelines/family_planning/IEC_Material/Annual_report/Annual_report_20-21.pdf.
Sweta Dash, “Despite Tragic History of Sterilisation Camps, Chhattisgarh Has Not Learnt Its Lessons,” The Wire, September 17, 2021, https://thewire.in/rights/tragic-history-sterilisation-camps-chhattisgarh-lessons-not-learnt.
Ankita Mukhopadhyay, “India: State withdraws forced sterilization order – DW – 02/23/2020,” DW, February 23, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/india-state-withdraws-forced-sterilization-order/a-52482133.
“ASHA Workers,” Press Information Bureau Government of India, March 13, 2020, https://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1606212.
Wendell Cox, “Population and Fertility to 2100: 10 Largest Nations,” Newgeography.com, August 11, 2022, https://www.newgeography.com/content/007546-population-and-fertility-2100-10-largest-nations.
Laura Silver et al. “Key facts about India’s growing population as it surpasses China’s population,” Pew Research Center, February 9, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/09/key-facts-as-india-surpasses-china-as-the-worlds-most-populous-country.
Yi Fuxian, “China and India Have Fewer People Than the UN Thinks,” Project Syndicate, May 22, 2023, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/united-nations-population-figures-for-china-and-india-are-inflated-by-yi-fuxian-2023-05.
Ibid.
Ankush Agrawal and Vikas Kumar, “How reliable are India’s official statistics?” East Asia Forum, April 6, 2012, https://eastasiaforum.org/2012/04/06/nagaland-s-demographic-somersault-how-reliable-are-india-s-official-statistics.
Lawrence L. Wu and Nicholas D. E. Mark, “Is US Fertility now Below Replacement? Evidence from Period vs. Cohort Trends,” IDEAS/RePEc, Population Research and Policy Review, 2023, https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/poprpr/v42y2023i5d10.1007_s11113-023-09821-y.html.
Narae Park et al. “Near-universal marriage, early childbearing, and low fertility: India's alternative fertility transition,” Demographic Research, June 27, 2023, https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol48/34/48-34.pdf.
Sampurna Kundu et al. “Surging trends of infertility and its behavioural determinants in India,” PubMed, PLos One, July 25, 2023, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10368286.
Maya N. Mascarenhas et al. “National, Regional, and Global Trends in Infertility Prevalence Since 1990: A Systematic Analysis of 277 Health Surveys,” PubMed, PLOS Medicine, December 18, 2012, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3525527.
Rajat Das Gupta, “Obesity and Abdominal Obesity in Indian Population: Findings from a Nationally Representative Study of 698286 Participants,” NCBI, Epidemiologia (Basel), May 12, 2023, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10204471.
Manolo Corichi, “In India, 81% limit meat in diet and 39% say they are vegetarian,” Pew Research Center, July 8, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/08/eight-in-ten-indians-limit-meat-in-their-diets-and-four-in-ten-consider-themselves-vegetarian.
Roman Pawlak et al. “How prevalent is vitamin B deficiency among vegetarians?” Nutrition Reviews, 2013, https://sci-hub.wf/10.1111/nure.12001; Saleem Ali Banihani, “Vitamin B12 and Semen Quality ,” Biomolecules, PubMed Central, June 7, 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5485731; Renu Bala et al. “Hyperhomocysteinemia and low vitamin B12 are associated with the risk of early pregnancy loss: A clinical study and meta-analyses,” Nutrition Research, May 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2021.05.002.
Kiran Mohan et al. “Exploring the dynamics of women consumer preference, attitude and behaviour towards meat and meat products consumption in India,” Meat Science, Vol. 193, Science Direct, July 28, 2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309174022001942.
Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review, JSTOR, December 2006, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20058922.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 637.
Ibid, p. 646.
Ibid, p. 647.
Ibid, p. 654.
Ibid, p. 655.
Pramod Kumar Sur, “Why is the Vaccination Rate Low in India?” medRxiv, March 8, 2021, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.21.21250216v3.full.
“Importance of Caste-Based Headcounts: An Analysis of Caste-Specific Demographics Transition in India,” CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, JSTOR, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2023, pp. 75-91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48728106.
Ibid.
Shreya Sinha, “Planning a small family is also patriotism: PM Modi,” India Today, August 15, 2019, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-modi-independence-day-population-1581004-2019-08-15.
Amy Kazmin, “BJP turns to coercion to limit India's population growth,” Financial Times, July 15, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/efda642c-cbe7-4cb4-a378-3bb55c94f818.
“A job or a child: India's coercive population policies,” Population Matters, November 4, 2022, https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/11/indias-coercive-population-policies.
Stephanie Kramer, “The Religious Composition of India,” Pew Research Center, September 21, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/09/21/religious-composition-of-india.
At least part of the explanation may be higher levels of meat-eating in Muslim households. Sonia Bhalotra et al. “The Puzzle of Muslim Advantage in Child Survival in India,” IZA DP No. 4009, February 2009, https://docs.iza.org/dp4009.pdf.
According to data from the OECD. See here: https://data.oecd.org/pop/working-age-population.htm
According to data from the OECD. See here: https://data.oecd.org/pop/elderly-population.htm#indicator-chart
Sophie Malin and Ashima Tyagi, “India’s Demographic Dividend: The Key to Unlocking Its Global Ambitions,” S&P Global Intelligence, August 3, 2023, https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/featured/special-editorial/look-forward/india-s-demographic-dividend-the-key-to-unlocking-its-global-ambitions
Employment Policy Department, “Informal Employment Trends in the Indian Economy: Persistent informality, but growing positive development,” International Labour Organization, 2019, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---ifp_skills/documents/publication/wcms_734503.pdf.
Kam Wing Chan, “Internal Migration in China: Integrating Migration with Urbanization Policies and Hukou Reform,” KNOMAD, November 16, 2021, https://www.knomad.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/Policy%20Brief%2016_Internal%20Migration%20in%20China.pdf.
“School enrollment, tertiary (% gross) - India | Data,” World Bank Data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR?locations=IN.
Bishwanath Goldar, “Share of Manufacturing in India's GDP: Stagnant or Increasing?” SSRN, January 23, 2023, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4335808. Aditya Bhattacharjea, “Labour Market Regulation and Industrial Performance in India: A Critical Review of the Empirical Evidence,” Indian Journal of Labour Economics, SSRN, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 211-232, January 6, 2007, https://ssrn.com/abstract=954908.
Viola Zhou and Nilesh Christopher, “Inside Foxconn’s India iPhone factory expansion,” Rest of World, November 28, 2023, https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-india-iphone-factory.
Bishwanath Goldar, “Has Manufacturing Share in Employment Stagnated in India? Taking a Close Look,” SSRN Papers, May 31, 2023, https://ssrn.com/abstract=4465101.
“Short-term power prices spike, demand doubles amid heat waves,” CRISIL, March 2, 2023, https://www.crisil.com/en/home/newsroom/press-releases/2023/03/short-term-power-prices-spike-demand-doubles-amid-heat-waves.html.
Jungho Kim, “Female education and its impact on fertility,” IZA World of Labor, February 2016, https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf