Hum do, humare teen: Why wanting more babies and having them are two different things

Hum do hamare ho do, paas aane se mat roko
–  Indeevar, Jurm, 1990. 

Come on baby light my fire
–  The Doors, 1967.

India has come a long way from the 1970s and the 1980s when the slogan hum do hamare do was plastered on walls across the country, to 1997, when the then minister of state for health and family welfare, Renuka Chowdhury, declared that “one is fun,” and, more recently, Janhavi Nilekani arguing that “three-child families need to become a mainstream choice”. 

From India having a lot of babies to India having fewer babies to India now being told that it needs to have more babies, the story has come full circle.

Dear reader, if you are the kind who still reads newspapers or follows what used to be referred to as the mainstream Indian press, you would know that during the course of June 2026, a small-scale industry writing on India’s falling fertility rate, seems to have emerged. I have decided to join that bandwagon.

There are two recently released government reports which suggest that India’s total fertility rate continues to decline. 

The first is the rather complicatedly titled Sample Registration System Statistical Report (SRSSR) 2024. The second is National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6), 2023-24.

In simple English, a falling fertility rate basically means that the average Indian woman is having fewer babies than she was in the past.

As per SRSSR 2024, the total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen to 1.9. As per the NFHS-6, the TFR has fallen to 2.

This basically means that on average 100 women now have 190 or 200 babies, during their child bearing years, depending on the report that one chooses to look at.

What does this mean? India’s total fertility rate is now lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. 

The replacement fertility rate is the average number of children each woman needs to have for one generation to replace the next without the population growing or shrinking. It is typically around 2.1 children per woman. The extra fraction of 0.1 is because a few girls will not survive up until their child bearing age.

This basically means that if 100 women on average have 210 children, and this trend continues over the decades, the population will eventually stabilize and continue to remain stable.

In the Indian case, the TFR now is 1.9 or 2, which is lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. 

India’s TFR has been falling for a while now.  It fell from 5.2 children per woman in 1971 to 4.8 in 1981, 3.6 in 1991, 3.1 in 2001 and 2.4 by 2011, with each successive census recording a lower figure.

In November 2021, the government had released the phase II findings of National Family Health Survey 5 (NFHS-5), which stated that India’s TFR had declined from 2.2 to 2. So, close to five years back, we knew that India’s TFR was already lower than its replacement rate.

So, why all the hungama now? The Economist happened to do a long and detailed piece on this phenomenon, and that led to the small scale industry emerging.

Nonetheless, an average Indian woman having fewer babies will have serious repercussions which will play out slowly over the next few decades. 

Will India’s population decline?  

The simple answer is not immediately. A decline in TFR does not translate into an immediate population decline due to something known as the population momentum effect.

Even though the total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level, the number of women entering their childbearing years will continue to rise because fertility rates were much higher in the past.

Take the case of China. Its TFR fell below the replacement rate in 1991, three and a half decades back. But its population kept growing. It peaked only in 2021, three decades later, at 1.41 billion, and has been shrinking at a very gradual rate since.

Nonetheless, the TFR in China has now fallen to 1. It is expected that if things don’t change the Chinese population will reduce to around 700 million by the end of this century.

So, when will India’s population start shrinking? As per United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024, India’s population in 2026 is expected to be around 1.48 billion.

The population growth will keep slowing down in the decades to come and India’s population will peak at 1.7 billion around 2061. So, like was the case with China, it will take a few decades for the population to peak and then start shrinking.

In 2100, it is expected that India will have a population of around 1.51 billion, very close to where we are right now. 

Of course, like all long-term forecasts, this forecast is also based on certain assumptions. These numbers are what are referred to as the median forecast.

Under the low-fertility forecast, which assumes that an average Indian woman has fewer babies than is currently projected, the country's population is expected to peak at 1.55 billion in 2045.

Basically, India has around two to three decades before its population peaks. Why does that matter? We will come to that.

Why are Indians having fewer babies?

If you are the kind who likes to go down Instagram rabbit holes, like I do, you will know that there is a whole genre of over the top reels which are trying very hard to be funny, around the topic of mothers-in-law asking their daughters-in-law to have kids, and the daughters-in-law resisting it.

Of course, one look at our own families should tell us that every generation is having fewer kids. 

My paternal grandparents had five kids. My maternal grandparents had three. My parents had two. Me and my younger sibling haven’t had any.

Now, there are multiple reasons for this. 

First, for families living in extreme poverty, having many children has often been a rational survival strategy. Children contribute to household income through work, and when infant mortality is high, parents have more children knowing that not all may survive into adulthood.

As living standards and the standard of healthcare improves, more children survive and live to be adults. This reduces the need to have more kids and the family size begins to shrink.

India’s infant mortality rate has been falling over the years. As per SRSSS 2024, it stood at 24, meaning that one in every 42 infants die within one year of their life.

The rate was at 39 in 2014, implying that one in every 26 infants died within one year of their life. It was at 57 in 2006, meaning that one in every 18 infants died within a year of their life.

At the same time falling poverty levels and improving health standards have also had an impact. As the SRSSR 2024 points out: “In case of about 95.4 percent live births, the mothers have received… medical attention at delivery either at [a] government hospital or at [a] private hospital in 2024.”

These factors have worked towards women having fewer kids.

When it comes to poverty, the states with the most poverty are having the most kids. 

The TFR is the highest in Bihar, where it stands at 2.9, implying that 100 women on average have 290 children. Bihar is the poorest state in India with a per capita income of Rs 69,321 in 2024-25, or less than Rs 6,000 a month.

Bihar is followed by Uttar Pradesh at 2.6, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at 2.4 and 2.3, respectively.

Delhi with a per capita income of Rs 4.93 lakh in 2024-25 had a TFR of 1.2. Kerala with a per capita income of Rs 3.1 lakh had a TFR of 1.3. 

The relatively well-to-do peninsular Indian states had lower TFRs. But so did West Bengal which had a TFR of 1.3 at a per capita income of Rs 1.63 lakh, showing that there are exceptions to every rule.

Second, the increasing ability of women to read and write plays a major role in reducing the TFR. 

As Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund write in Factfulness – Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think: “The data shows that half the increase in child survival in the world happens because the mothers can read and write.”

Among other things this includes the fact that the mothers “can read the instructions on that jar of pills”. 

How does the evidence stack up in the Indian case? Bihar with an illiteracy rate of 18% for women in the 15-49 years age group, has the highest TFR. 

Uttar Pradesh with an illiteracy rate of 13.6% is second. Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have illiteracy rates of 13% and 11.6%, respectively.

Jharkhand which has an illiteracy rate of 14% has a TFR of 2.2, which is lower than states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, but higher than the overall TFR of 1.9.

Of course, like most trends at the overall societal level, this trend isn’t 100% correct, but it’s broadly true.

At the overall national level, the TFR for illiterate women is 3.2, implying that on average 100 illiterate women have 320 children. The TFR for literate women is 1.8.

Not surprisingly, as the education level increases, the TFR decreases. The TFR for women who are graduates and above is 1.6, which is half of that of illiterate women.

In fact, even some education makes a difference. In 2011, the TFR for women without any formal education was 3.1. It had fallen to a replacement rate of 2.1 by 2024.

For those with below primary education the rate has fallen from 3 to 2.1, during the same period. 

In Bihar, the state with the highest TFR, the TFR for illiterate women is 4.2, whereas that for graduates and above is 2.2.  In Uttar Pradesh it is 3.8 and 2.2, respectively.

This shows that in poorer states even the educated women tend to have more kids. 

As Charlie Robertson writes in The Time-Travelling Economist: “When families have lots of children, the children become the parents’ “savings”. By the time they become teenagers [they] are hopefully earning an income… Eventually, they become your pension and can provide housing when you’re old.” The point being that when families are poor, they look at children as future savings.

Third, the mean effective marriage age for women has gone up over the years. It was at 19.3 years in 1990. In 2024, it was 23.1 years. This has led to the average age at which women give birth to their first child going up to 28.4 years. It was 26.5 years in 2011. 

Fourth, in many countries, the collapse of the institution of marriage has also been blamed for women having fewer kids. But that isn’t true for India. In 1991, the proportion of married females was 45.7%, while the proportion of widowed/divorced/separated women was 8.1%.

Hence, in 1991, for every 100 females on average in the population, 54 women were married/ widowed/divorced/separated.

In 2024, the proportion of married females was 49.6%, while the proportion of widowed/divorced/separated women was 5.4%.

So, in 2024, for every 100 females on average in the population 55 women were married/ widowed/divorced/separated.

Clearly, things haven’t changed much on this front. Indian women are still getting married at the same rate as they were more than three decades back. They are just having fewer kids.

Fifth, more women entering the workforce also tends to be a reason for families having fewer kids. This doesn’t really apply much to India at the aggregate level.

Data from the World Bank shows that in 1990, the female labour participation rate – that is the proportion of women in the age group 15 to 64 years who are employed or are actively looking for a job – stood at 32%. It was at 35% in 2024.

The government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey puts that ratio at 40% in 2025. The NFHS-6 says that nearly 31 in every 100 women in the 15-49 age bracket worked in the last 12 months and were paid in cash.

Clearly, the proportion of Indian women going out to work isn’t high and hasn’t really changed much over the years.

Despite these factors, families are having fewer kids. Why? As the Roslings write: “Once parents see children survive… both the men and the women instead start dreaming of having fewer, well-educated children… More energy and time is invested in each child’s education. It’s a virtuous cycle of change.”

So, instead of dividing their limited resources on more kids, the parents want the best for one or two kids. This is referred to as the quantity-quality tradeoff – if a family has many children, each child usually gets less money, attention, and opportunities. With fewer children, the assets and efforts required to raise them well, get consolidated.

Why does this matter?

If you are the kind who gets your education from the WhatsApp University, then families having fewer children and that leading to population growth ultimately slowing down, seems like good news.

I mean all these years we have been told that India has a lot of problems because of its very high population leading to not enough resources being available.

The trouble is that there is more to the whole thing than just this. And it’s something known as the demographic dividend.

It is a period of a few decades when, thanks to a falling total fertility rate – that is women having fewer babies – a country's working-age population (those aged 15-64) grows at a higher rate than its overall population.

As more young people enter the workforce, find jobs, earn incomes and spend money, the economy is expected to grow faster than before, lifting more people out of poverty. In theory, this is how things are expected to pan out. 

How do things look for India? Take a look at the following chart. It plots the one-year population growth from 1991 onwards against the one-year growth in working age population (15-64 years). 

The chart shows that the working-age population growth was higher than the overall population growth in 1991 and it continues to be so.  This is expected to change in 2035, when the population growth will become higher than the working population growth again.

The working age population is expected to peak in 2048 with the population peaking in 2061. These are median estimates.

If we look at low-fertility estimates, which assumes that an average Indian woman has fewer babies than is currently projected, the working age population peaks in 2043.

The point being that at best we have around two decades more to cash in on the demographic dividend.

Indeed, the demographic dividend is not permanent. Countries get one chance to benefit from it. Once the working-age population starts shrinking that opportunity disappears.

Of course, a demographic dividend can create the conditions for faster economic growth, but by itself it does not guarantee it. 

As Ruchir Sharma writes in The 10 Rules of Successful Nations: “India, too, had assumed that its booming population would provide a demographic dividend, but now it struggles to generate jobs for all its youth.”

I have written extensively on the issue of jobs over the years, so, won’t get into further detail, other than quoting Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 report: “Youth unemployment rates are significantly higher than overall unemployment rates globally, but in India, this gap is particularly pronounced.”

What are the repercussions?

If one were to summarise this in one line: India will grow old before it becomes rich.

As India's working-age population peaks and then shrinks, the ratio of working-age population to dependents – those 65 and over, and those under 15 – will worsen. 

Fewer working-age people will have to support more elderly people – through taxes, through family care, through pension systems.

Take a look at the following chart which plots the old-age dependency ratio, which is the number of people aged 65 years or over, divided by the working age population of 15 to 64 years.

As the chart above shows, as families have fewer children, the number of elderly people relative to the working-age population will continue to rise. The increase is much faster post 2030 onwards.

This chart extends to 2060, by which time there will be 30 people aged 65 or over for every 100 people of working age.

This may lead to the government taxing the working age population more in order to be able to meet its growing expenditure towards the elderly, as they become bigger vote banks.

It will leave lesser money in the hands of the young and the middle-aged. And that will have its own repercussions.

Another way of looking at this is that the median age of India’s population will increase at a faster rate.

The median age is literally the age of the middle Indian – if you line up every Indian from youngest to oldest, the age of the person standing exactly in the middle is the median age. Half of the population is younger than that individual and half is older.

The current median age is around 29 years, which basically means that half of India’s population is 29 years of age or under. This is expected to cross 35 years by 2041, as per the median forecast. As per the low-fertility forecast that year is likely to be 2038.

The point being that the structure of India’s demography is changing at a fast pace and that India’s days as a young nation won’t last for very long. 

Further, India has no meaningful social security net for the old. The assumption, baked into the culture for generations, has been that children will look after parents. Fewer children means that assumption starts to crack.

4-2-1

China is in the middle of what is known as the 4-2-1 phenomenon. China’s TFR over the last few years has been 1. Most couples have only one child. As that child grows up, they will often find themselves responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.

India will start becoming a 4-2-1 nation in the decades to come.

This will have social implications given the inherent preference of the male child in many households. This is something that played out in China in the last few decades.

There is also a geographic dimension that will get politically uncomfortable. 

The states that have already gone well below replacement rate – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana Karnataka, West Bengal, Maharashtra – will see their working-age populations shrink faster.

On the other hand, the working age populations of states that are still above replacement level – Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan – will continue to grow. 

This will intensify the already-fraught debate about delimitation: the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies based on population.

States that responsibly reduced their fertility decades ago face losing political representation to states that did not. Having fewer babies, it turns out, comes with a democratic penalty.

It’s not easy to increase the fertility rate
Janhavi Nilekani, founder and chairperson of Aastrika Foundation, in a much shared piece published in The Times of India had suggested that “to slow population decline, three-child families need to become a mainstream choice”.

She also said that: “Keeping the national TFR above 1.5… is a reasonable ambition.”

The trouble is that theory is easy. History suggests that it’s one thing to get women and families to have fewer babies, and it’s totally another thing to get them to have more babies. 

Governments that set out to reduce fertility – through education, contraception access, female employment and even coercion – have repeatedly succeeded. 

Governments that subsequently panic about population decline and attempt to reverse course have largely failed. Let’s take the Chinese case.

Dan Wang in Breakneck—China’s Quest to Engineer the Future suggests that China is run by engineers. He talks about Song Jian, a missile scientist who proposed the one-child policy which was started in 1980. 

Jian had written: “China’s population by the second half of the next century [the 21st century] would go up to 4.5 billion…. And it would continue to grow forever.”

Wang suggests that only an engineer could assume that the population would continue to grow in a straight line at an unvarying rate.

In 1963, China’s total fertility rate stood at 7.5, meaning on average 100 women had 750 children. By 1979, a year before the one-child policy became the norm, 100 women on average were having 270 babies.

So, the forces which lead to women and families having fewer babies were already at work. But that was ignored.

Wang highlights the way the coercive model worked: “By 1990, in order to have a first child, a woman needed up to twelve documents from her workplace and various party officials and a consent form agreeing to contraceptive measures after birth.” There were mass sterilisation and abortion campaigns too. 

In 1982, China’s population crossed one billion, convincing the Chinese leadership even more about the need for coercive population control.

By 1991, China’s TFR was 1.9, below the replacement rate of 2.1. Given that families were having fewer children, the preference for a male-child grew. Or as Wang points out, in 1999 “China’s official sex ratio at birth [was] 120 boys born for every 100 girls.”

By 2000, China’s TFR had fallen to 1.6. It moved in the range of 1.6 to 1.8 over the next 17 years. In 2015, the one-child policy became a two-child policy. In 2021, it became three.

But China’s TFR continued to fall. From 2022 to 2024 it has been at 1, meaning on an average a Chinese family is having just one child. 

As Vaclav Smil writes in Growth – From Microorganisms to Megacities: “Fewer and fewer children… changes the perception of the ideal family size.” This is something that has clearly played out in China.

From 1980 to 2016, the average Chinese was told, one child is good. That message was drilled down over and over again. Undoing that will be very difficult.

In 2024, six million Chinese got married, half of that in 2014. One reason is that judges are now reluctant to grant a divorce. 

In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is trying to use coercive tactics again, but this time to get women to have more kids.

Indeed, as Wang points out, women in Chinese cities report receiving regular calls from neighbourhood officials asking when they plan to have children. The questioning can be intrusive, with officials even asking when a woman last had her period.

The propaganda arm of the CCP has said that every party member should have three children.

But even with this coercion, in 2025 “adult diapers are expected to outsell baby diapers,” leading to a situation where “China has already grown old before it grew rich”.

In fact, “when Japan’s population started to decline (fourteen years before China’s), it was more than twice as rich.”

The critical insight is that the demographic forces that lead to women deciding to have fewer babies are structural.

Governments do not merely persuade women to have fewer children. They change the underlying conditions – economic, social, medical – factors that made large families rational.

And that cannot be un-changed by running a campaign in the opposite direction. Young Chinese women, particularly in cities, have internalised the small-family norm across two full generations. More than that, they have built careers, financial independence and life expectations around it.

Interestingly, as Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist (he won the Economics prize), had put it: “You just don’t get it…In China, the robots are going to come just in time.” 

And this is something the country is already working on. As the Financial Times pointed out in a recent news report, there is a growing consensus across China that the country needs to deploy “embodied artificial intelligence”  – AI-powered robots – in as many tasks as possible, and as quickly as possible.

Getting back to India. Consider the quantity quality paradox mentioned earlier. In the month of May, the tuition fee inflation at an all India level was 3.1%. 

Now, this almost sounds like a joke to anyone sending their kid to a private school, where the fee keeps growing at a much faster pace. 

A Ministry of Education report suggests that in 2024-25, two in five kids went to private schools. 

This is just one example of the quantity quality paradox. There are other issues that keep cropping up as a kid grows up. In this scenario, expecting parents to have even two kids is difficult. 

For many parents who decide to have one kid, it’s a perfectly rational decision, given that the resources that they can rustle up for the healthy upbringing of their kid, are limited. 

Of course, it will have many repercussions at the broader societal level. But how do you hold them responsible for that? 

Further, other than Nilekani’s suggestion, N Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, has announced a one-time incentive of Rs 30,000 for the third child and Rs 40,000 for the fourth.  

Now, offering money to families to have more kids is something that Europe has experimented with over the years. It does help nudge the fertility rate slightly upwards.

It can also bring forward births that would otherwise have happened later – a phenomenon statisticians refer to as the tempo effect.

But the fertility rate doesn’t go back to the replacement rate through incentives alone. The structural forces – women's labour market participation, high urban housing costs, the individualisation of life choices, the normalisation of the one or two-child family as a cultural default – prove far more powerful than any cash transfer.

In fact, the high urban housing costs can be a huge factor in Indian cities, where real estate has become a financial asset. Smaller apartment sizes can also have an impact on families choosing to have fewer babies.

So, where does that leave us?

For the states that have already fallen below the replacement level – and there are 15 large states and Delhi – it is worth remembering that these are not temporary dips. 

They reflect structural realities that cash incentives will not reverse. 

What governments can do is reduce the penalty women pay for having children – better childcare, genuine workplace flexibility, housing policy that makes larger homes affordable.  None of this will restore replacement level fertility. But where we end up will be a lot better than the situation where no efforts are made. 

The deeper lesson here is: the time to act is before the norm solidifies, not after. Once a generation grows up expecting to have one child, that expectation becomes self-fulfilling across the institutions, infrastructure and identities of an entire society.

India that way still has a chance. The policy task is to latch on to this opportunity. Also, how we end up doing things on the AI front over the next few decades before the working age population starts shrinking, will end up mattering quite a bit.

Indeed, the thing about demographic trends is that they are the slowest-moving of all crises, and therefore the easiest to ignore – until they are impossible to reverse. 

India still has a window. The working-age population hasn't peaked. The southern states are ageing, but the north is still young. 

The moment to build the social infrastructure – the childcare, the pension systems, the flexible workplaces — is now, while the dividend is still paying out. Every year of delay is a year closer to the moment when the options run out.

And of course, we need to create more jobs. Many more jobs.

Given that, a large part of the future will still be determined by the opportunities the babies have when they grow up.

Vivek Kaul is an economic commentator and a writer.