Demographics & Society · March 2026
From Too Many to Too Few: How India Quietly Stopped Worrying About Its Population — and Started Worrying About Something Else
For decades, India was told its greatest threat was too many people. Now its fertility rate has dropped below the level needed to replace the population. The country that once sterilised millions in a panic is now debating whether it has enough children. The story of how that happened is more complicated — and more human — than either alarm would suggest.
There is a photograph that circulates occasionally in Indian demographic circles — grainy, black-and-white, dated somewhere in the mid-1970s. It shows a government camp in rural north India: a row of cots, men lying still, and a banner overhead that reads, in Hindi, “Small Family, Happy Family.” The men had just undergone vasectomies. Some came voluntarily, drawn by the offer of cash and a transistor radio. Others, by numerous accounts, did not come entirely of their own choosing.
That photograph belongs to one of the most troubling episodes in post-independence India — the forced sterilisation drives of the Emergency years, 1975 to 1977. Men and women in certain states were rounded up, pressured, or incentivised into permanent sterilisation. The government tracked numbers. It handed out prizes to districts with the highest “couple protection rates.” It treated human reproduction as a logistical problem to be solved by a determined administration.
Half a century later, India’s problem looks completely different. The country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime — has fallen to 1.9. That number sits below 2.1, which is the replacement rate, the minimum needed for a population to sustain itself across generations without immigration. India is, in other words, no longer producing enough children to replace itself. The country that once panicked about too many babies is now, in certain circles, beginning to quietly panic about too few.
How did this happen? And what does it mean? Two recent publications — a reflective essay by Bangladeshi public health leader Mushtaque Chowdhury, and a population projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation — offer complementary answers. Together, they trace one of the most consequential and least understood policy journeys in modern Indian history.
I. The Bomb That Wasn’t
To understand where India’s population anxiety came from, you have to travel back to 1968 and a book called The Population Bomb, written by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. The book was a bestseller of a particular kind: urgent, terrifying, and, as it turned out, mostly wrong.
What Is Neo-Malthusianism?
The Theory Behind the Panic
In 1798, an English clergyman named Thomas Malthus argued that human populations grow faster than food supply — and that famine, disease, and war were nature’s way of correcting the imbalance. “Neo-Malthusianism” is the modern revival of that idea: the belief that too many people, especially in poor countries, will overwhelm available resources and cause civilisational collapse. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was its most famous expression. The theory has been heavily criticised — food production has largely kept pace with population growth through technology and trade — but it had enormous influence on Western aid policy and on governments in India that were dependent on Western donors in the 1960s and 70s.
Ehrlich painted apocalyptic scenes of a “population tsunami” in developing countries — mass starvation, social collapse, civilisational overload. The book terrified Western policymakers. It also gave intellectual cover to those who believed the solution lay in controlling the reproduction of people in poorer nations — a project that Western governments and foundations were willing to fund generously, as long as other countries bore its consequences.
In India, this agenda found a willing champion in Sripati Chandrasekhar, a demographer and sociologist who served as the country’s health minister in 1967. Chandrasekhar established a full department of family planning, pushed a “cafeteria approach” to fertility control — offering a menu of contraceptive options to women — and launched sterilisation drives across the country. He raised the legal age of marriage. He persuaded Parliament. He built a bureaucratic apparatus whose entire purpose was to reduce the number of Indians being born.
During the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, sterilisation targets were set at the district level and passed down through the bureaucracy like production quotas in a factory. States competed for awards. Officials cut corners, used pressure, and looked away when consent was not freely given. In some states, men were told they could not receive government services — ration cards, land records, loans — without being sterilised. The numbers were, by official count, impressive. The human cost was vast and unevenly borne, falling most heavily on the poor, the rural, and those with the least power to refuse.
II. The Study That Was Too Good to Be True
While Ehrlich was writing his ‘bomb’, something quieter and more careful was being done in Khanna, a village in Punjab. A team from Harvard University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, had been running one of the world’s first large-scale family planning trials: offering contraceptive advice and supplies to married women, tracking uptake and birth rates over years. The results looked remarkable. High rates of “acceptance” among participants. The study became a landmark in global family planning advocacy, cited in journals and in donor reports.
There was just one problem. Acceptance and practice turned out to be very different things. The birth rates in Khanna didn’t change.
An anthropologist named Mahmood Mamdani — whose son, recently became the Mayor of New York — went back to Khanna and asked a simpler question: why did families who said yes to contraception keep having children? The answer he found was not ignorance or indifference. It was calculation. Poor farming families in Punjab needed children — to work the land, to support parents in old age, to offset the near-certainty that some children would not survive to adulthood. Children were not a problem to be solved. They were a rational economic response to a life with no other safety net.
Mamdani’s finding pointed to something that Western-funded family planning programmes were structurally unable to see: you cannot change fertility rates by distributing contraceptives to people whose lives make large families entirely sensible. The change has to come from somewhere deeper — from economic security, from the education of girls, from falling infant mortality, from a world in which a family can afford to have fewer children because it trusts that the ones it has will survive.
III. “Development Is the Best Contraceptive”
In 1974, India’s health minister at the time, Karan Singh, stood at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, and said something that became one of the most quoted lines in the history of global demography: “Development is the best contraceptive.“
It was a rebuke to the Western population-control agenda — a statement that poor countries’ birth rates would fall not through coercion or external pressure but through the same process that had already driven birth rates down in the West: education, healthcare, women’s economic participation, and rising living standards. India, Singh was saying, did not have a population problem. It had a poverty problem. Solve the second and the first would take care of itself.
What Is the Demographic Transition?
The Pattern Every Developing Country Follows
The demographic transition is a pattern observed in virtually every country that has industrialised. It has four stages: first, birth rates and death rates are both high (many children born, many die young). Second, death rates fall as medicine improves, but birth rates remain high — population grows quickly. Third, birth rates begin to fall as people get richer, women get educated, and children cost more than they earn. Fourth, birth and death rates are both low — the population stabilises or begins to shrink. India has moved through stages two and three faster than expected, and parts of the country are now entering stage four.
The proof came from India’s own south. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka — states that invested heavily in female literacy, infant healthcare, and economic development — all saw their birth rates collapse without any coercive intervention. Kerala reached replacement fertility in 1988, when the national average was still a child-per-woman higher. Tamil Nadu followed in 1993. Today, Maharashtra’s fertility rate is lower than Norway’s.
The contrast with northern states — which won national awards for high “couple protection rates” while continuing to show stubbornly elevated birth rates — was stark. Handing out contraceptives had not worked. Sending girls to school had.
IV. The Numbers Now
India’s national TFR today stands at 1.9 — below the replacement rate of 2.1 for the first time in recorded history. The country’s fertility fell from nearly five children per woman at independence, to around three in the 1990s, to under two today. The number of babies born in India annually peaked at around 29 million at the turn of the millennium and has been falling since.
India’s Fertility — The Numbers at a Glance
- National TFR (2023): 1.9 — below replacement level of 2.1
- Urban TFR: 1.6 | Rural TFR: 2.1
- Lowest state: Sikkim — 1.1
- Highest state: Bihar — 3.0
- TFR for women with no schooling: 3.3 | TFR for literate women: 1.8
- 18 states and UTs are now below replacement level
- Population projected to rise from 1.36 billion (2021) to 1.59 billion (2051), then plateau and decline
- Lancet projection: TFR could fall to 1.29 by 2050
But these national figures hide a fault line that is shaping Indian politics with increasing intensity. The southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana — have had below-replacement fertility for decades. Their populations are ageing, their workforces are shrinking, and their governments are already thinking about how to support growing numbers of elderly residents. Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recently announced his government is exploring a law to incentivise families to have more children — a striking position in a country that spent decades doing the opposite.
The northern states — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh — still have TFRs above 2.5 in rural areas. Their populations are younger, their workforces are still growing, and they contribute disproportionately to India’s national headcount. Under the current system of parliamentary representation, seats are allocated based on population. When the delimitation exercise — the redrawing of constituency boundaries — eventually happens, states that kept their birth rates high will gain seats. States that reduced theirs will lose them. The south, which did what the national family planning programme asked, may be politically penalised for its success. It is perhaps the most perverse incentive structure in Indian democratic history.
V. The Ageing Country in Waiting
A projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation, led by demographers S. Irudaya Rajan and J. Retnakumar, maps what India’s population will look like between now and 2051. The picture it draws is not of explosion or collapse, but of a slow, structural transformation whose consequences will be felt in every sector of public life.
India’s population will continue to grow — from 1.36 billion in 2021 to approximately 1.59 billion in 2051 — but the pace slows sharply. The annual growth rate of 0.5 percent is about a third of what it was during the high-fertility decades.
More importantly, the composition changes radically. The share of children in India’s population — already halved from 40 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today — will continue to fall. The share of people over 60 will nearly double, reaching over 20 percent of the population by 2050. In Kerala alone, the elderly will constitute 25 percent of the state’s population by 2036.
What Is the Demographic Dividend? (Simply Explained)
The Window That Opens — and Closes
The demographic dividend is the economic boost that happens when a large share of a country’s population is of working age — neither very young (needing to be supported as children) nor very old (needing pensions and healthcare). With more workers than dependents, savings rise, productivity grows, and economies accelerate. China’s rapid growth in the 1980s–2000s was partly driven by its demographic dividend. India is currently in the middle of this window. The problem is that windows close. Once the working-age population starts ageing without a sufficient supply of young workers to replace them — as is already happening in south India — the dividend reverses into a burden. Japan is the most extreme example: it has more elderly citizens than children and an economy that has struggled with stagnation for decades.
India’s working-age population is expected to keep growing until 2041, which means the demographic dividend — the economic advantage of having more workers than dependents — is still available to harvest. But it will not wait indefinitely. The window is open. It will not stay that way.
The challenge is compounded by technology. Artificial intelligence and automation are eliminating the kinds of jobs — routine manufacturing, data processing, basic administrative work — that countries at India’s stage of development have historically used to absorb large numbers of young workers and generate the savings that fund industrialisation.
The jobs that automation cannot easily replace are in human-facing services: healthcare, teaching, social work, elder care. These are precisely the sectors where India’s growing elderly population will create the greatest demand. The demographic and technological challenges, read together, point to the same answer: invest in training a large health and care workforce.
VI. What the Policy Should Look Like Now
For most of independent India’s history, population policy meant one thing: getting the numbers down. The language of “couple protection rates,” of targets, of “cafeteria approaches” to contraception — all of it was oriented toward subtraction. The success of that project, paradoxically, has now made it obsolete. India no longer needs to reduce its birth rate. It needs to manage the consequences of a birth rate that has already fallen — and fallen faster, in some places, than anyone planned for.
What this means in practice is a shift in the entire purpose of population-related policy — from controlling numbers to improving the quality of life of the people who exist. This involves several things that India has historically underinvested in.
The New Policy Agenda — What Needs to Change
- From population control to population health. Policy energy should shift toward keeping people well at every stage of life — maternal and child health, chronic disease in middle age, mental health, elder care.
- Malnutrition in all its forms. India still carries a heavy burden of both under-nutrition in children and over-nutrition (obesity, diabetes) in adults. Both require attention across the entire lifecycle.
- Ageing infrastructure. Health systems built to handle infectious diseases and childbirth need to be expanded to handle the ailments of an older population: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, disability.
- Health workforce as employment. Since India’s working-age population won’t peak until 2041, there is still time to train a large corps of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and community health workers — creating jobs and addressing a chronic shortage simultaneously.
- Climate and pandemic readiness. Large populations remain ecologically significant. Expanding human settlements erases natural barriers between ecosystems, increasing the risk of zoonotic disease spillovers. Population health and environmental health are linked.
There is also the question of ecology — one that both publications flag and that rarely enters the demographic debate in India. Even a slower-growing population of 1.59 billion people places enormous demands on land, water, food, and energy.
The pressure on natural ecosystems — the forests, wetlands, and wild corridors that buffer human settlements from the microbes and climate shifts beyond them — does not diminish simply because birth rates have fallen. The absolute number still matters.
There is a particular kind of historical irony in the fact that Singapore and South Korea— two of the Asian economies that most aggressively pursued population control programmes in the 1970s and 80s — are now paying couples cash bonuses to have more children. The incentives have simply reversed. The anxiety has simply reversed. The bureaucratic apparatus that once tracked how many people could be prevented from being born now tracks how many can be encouraged into existence.
India is not at that point yet, and may never reach it at the national level. Its demography is too large and too uneven for a single policy lever to work everywhere. But the direction of travel is clear: the old language of the population bomb — of targets and drives and “protection rates” — belongs to a chapter that is now closed.
The question now is not how many Indians there will be, but what kind of country those Indians will grow old in.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.