The recent SRS 2024 report shows that India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is 1.9, compared to a replacement rate of around 2.2. We are a rapidly ageing society, heading towards fewer working-age adults for every retiree.

Even this understates the scale of India’s pending population decline. Over 500 million Indians — 40% of the population — live in states where TFR is at or below 1.5. There are no signs of a floor; fertility continues to drop in all regions.

In the govt maternity hospitals I work with, the labour wards are visibly emptying. Annual births peaked at about 29 million at the turn of the millennium. Today, around 23 million babies are born each year. As these ever-smaller birth cohorts grow up, the shrinkage spreads through the population. The absolute number of children has already peaked around 2010 and has been falling since.

Population decline is not inherently harmful, and we can adapt to its challenges. More working-age adults can join the workforce, especially given extremely low female labour force participation rates. Retirement ages can be increased. Machinery can replace human physical labour. Artificial intelligence can replace human cognitive labour. Internal migration can be expanded.

Adaptation, though, takes time. Nor is it guaranteed. Longer working lives, increased machinery and AI, reduced pensions, and increased internal migration — each of these is hugely controversial. Passing a single law on any of these subjects takes years.

India’s population management programmes themselves show how long reform can take. Fifty years after the Emergency, and twenty-five years after annual births peaked, the system is still focused on reducing births. Of married Indian women aged 15 to 49, 37% are permanently sterilised. If they later desire another child —due to infant loss, remarriage, improved financial circumstances — they no longer have the choice.

India urgently needs pro-natal policies that incentivise childbearing. Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh have moved in that direction with cash and other incentives, but much more is needed. While pronatalism won’t reverse population decline, it can at least slow its pace. Keeping the national TFR above 1.5 and ensuring each individual state is above 1.1 is a reasonable ambition.

Stabilising TFR above 1.5 requires plenty of families with three or more children. Today, we think of three children as unaffordable, although rupee incomes have increased substantially. In terms of opportunity cost, though, children have become very expensive. Our options for careers, travel, and hobbies are better than ever before, and so, to have a child, we must give up more. In an earlier age, I might have had multiple kids. In this era, I opted for one son and time to write op-eds.

Today, at Aastrika, a maternity hospital in Bengaluru, a third child is a rarity, mainly seen among our expat clients. Yet, to slow population decline, three-child families need to become a mainstream choice. Realistically, some Indian adults will choose a childfree lifestyle while others will have a strong desire for ‘one-and-done’. To compensate and keep overall TFR above 1.5, society must support large families. It’s surely easier to support a family to have a third child than to encourage a committed single to settle down with an EMI, report cards, and parent-teacher meetings!

Supporting large families will require us to transfer resources through tax advantages, subsidies, and other incentives. This ensures that the cost of raising future generations falls on all adults, and not just on those who put in the hard work of child-rearing, from which the rest of us will benefit. Our policy debate is far from pronatalism, but in the meantime, we must at least stop disincentivising large families. Unfortunately, the two-child norm and anti-natal thinking are embedded throughout our policy architecture. Maternity leave benefits are 26 weeks for the first two children, and only 12 thereafter. Income-tax relief for education applies only for the first two offspring.

Such legislation needs urgent reform. At today’s fertility rates, every 100 Indian adults are succeeded by just 49 adult grandchildren at Karnataka’s TFR of 1.5, and only 37 at Tamil Nadu and Kerala’s TFR of 1.3.

The gap between 1.5 and 1.3 sounds small. In reality, it is 49 adults rather than 37 in two generations — a substantial difference. Those extra adults protect society and living standards, in case robots and AI agents cannot be deployed at scale, or if regulatory infrastructure cannot adapt fast enough to population decreases. They allow us to care for the elderly with dignity.

In the past, family portraits centred grandparents, surrounded by their grandchildren. Today, portraits centre children, surrounded by their elders. We still have a window for cultural change: a revival of large families, siblings, and cousins. Not for all families. Not even for most. But for a meaningful minority. A gentle glide, rather than abrupt population collapse, requires full-throated embrace of a new credo: Hum do. Humare teen.

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