India's falling fertility rate calls for fast-improving gender justice
The State of World Population report for 2025, published by a UN agency, notes that India's total fertility rate (TFR) has dipped below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman of child-bearing age. It is now 1.9 for the country as a whole, with wide regional variation. India's National Family Health Survey of 2019-2021 had placed our TFR at 2.0.
What makes the UN report noteworthy is its emphasis on social factors that influence fertility. It focuses on reproductive agency as understood in a societal context, and that is welcome. Its call for the full realization of reproductive rights should draw our attention to gender justice, which is a vital aspect of diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Globally, a fertility boom in the second half of the 20th century led to widespread fears of a population explosion. Religious conservatives in the US worried about populations elsewhere growing too fast for anyone's good and funded family planning and population-control measures in Asia and Africa. Development economists worried about economic gains being outrun by an expanding pool of claimants to the fruits of growth.
These concerns linger in the unreformed world-views of many, including many of those who wield political power. Meanwhile, many people in the rich world seem obsessed with a population implosion—a crisis of not enough children being born. This anxiety is partly on account of the immigration needed to keep economies in expansion mode. The wave of anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping large swathes of the West, from the US to Europe, where xenophobic politics has been on the rise, can partly be attributed to fears of being outnumbered by people who do not look like Westerners.
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It is in this context that the UN report makes an important assertion: that the key problem—or the 'real fertility crisis"—is neither a population explosion nor implosion, but unrealized reproductive rights in relatively poor and well-off societies alike.
Getting rich need not enhance reproductive autonomy. South Korea offers an illustrative example of this. The country has a TFR of 0.8, as many Korean women eschew motherhood and marriage in protest against gender-unjust attitudes that impose all household chores and care burdens on women, who often lack financial security and childcare support. Here, the issue is not access to contraception or abortion rights as much as social mores that sustain gender oppression, leaving women to resist the patriarchy by opting not to have children at all.
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In India, attitudes vary widely with income status, social-group norms and the level of women's empowerment in varied settings. While India has many women with successful professional careers, this owes less to supportive partners sharing traditional housework and more to their ability to shift some of the burden to paid domestic help, offered typically by women who earn to keep kitchen stoves alight.
This model, though, is not sustainable. As incomes rise at the bottom of the pyramid, outsourcing domestic chores and care for the young and old could become prohibitively expensive. In other words, true economic success—with its bounty reaching every socioeconomic strata—could leave India staring at a South Korean fertility future in a few decades. To avert such an outcome, we must push for societal changes now. Gender equality needs to begin at home. And if that means leaving hoary old traditions behind, we should.
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