Despite having a two-child policy amendment in place, India must improve its ongoing steps to make this policy more stringent by factoring in all the challenges. In addition, the Indian Government should make people aware of the rampant repercussions of an increasing population, rather than forcing the bill on the people. “There is a need to control the population for the development of the country, irrespective of whether it is the population of Hindus or Muslims or other religions,” said the Minister of State of Social Justice and Empowerment, whose Republican Party of India is part of the NDA government at the Centre.
(d) Aspirations for Social Mobility and Family Size
Table 1 based on fertility estimates from the 2001 and 2011 censuses clearly establishes that 9 out of 35 states and Union Territories have TFRs below 2 (Guilmoto and Rajan 2013); however, this does not distinguish between period and cohort fertility. Hence, we examine several different sources of data to see if there is any evidence of an emerging trend towards families with a single child. By the late 1980s, economic costs and incentives created by the contract system were already reducing the number of children farmers wanted. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with demographic reality, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations.
In this case, will it be because the latter lacks the ambition for dreaming big dreams and is also hampered by cultural and institutional constraints on such dramatic fertility decline? Data from the Health Ministry’s most recent National Family Health Survey, released last week, showed India’s total fertility rate had dropped to 2.0, below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. As in China, in some states in India, women’s education and their aspirations for their children have contributed to lower birth rates. Birth rates in other states with high Muslim populations have also declined, but at a slower rate.
For China, and the world as a whole, the one child policy was one of the most important social policies ever implemented. “Considering the societal shifts, including the significant reduction in gender disparities as women’s lives have become increasingly similar to those of men, this trend is unlikely to reverse,” says Mr Dyson. We now turn to the evidence in support of each of these possibilities in the context of the one child family in India. Third, responses to fertility preferences and contraceptive use remain subject to measurement error, particularly since the interview setting often precludes privacy. However, a brief analysis of fertility preferences of women who have stopped at one child is instructive. About 73% of mothers with a single child said they did not want more children; 22% were sterilized.
While countries like France and Sweden took 120 and 80 years respectively to double their aging population from 7% to 14%, India is expected to reach this milestone in just 28 years, says Mr Goli. The Indian population is increasing exponentially and will continue to multiply in the coming years. This is the higher ratio of people of married age who will give birth to children. The state of Assam and Uttar Pradesh in India has adopted the two-child policy to control the rampantly increasing population.
The quantity–quality fertility–education
Although China’s fertility rate plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world during the 1970s under these restrictions, the Chinese government thought it was still too high, influenced by the global debate over a possible overpopulation crisis suggested by organizations such as the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club. Factual evidence has shown that a child limit greatly reduces the fertility rate, the unemployment rate, and is healthy for the planet. Requiring a child limit is usually successful in lowering the fertility rate but is also controversial and hard to mandate (especially when other strategies to lower the population exist). Despite the obstacles, one can conclude that a child limit is necessary in eliminating the issue of overpopulation in India.
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India is a country with a booming technology industry, one that relies on young people. There is fear that, by restricting the number of children that can be born, there will not be enough educated young people in the next generation to carry on India’s technological revolution. A child limit was already attempted in India however it didn’t take and was difficult to enforce. The child limit would not work in India as it did in China because it is a much more democratic country.
Although economic constraints lie at the heart of our arguments regarding low fertility in India, these are constraints posed by growth rather than scarcity. As previous sections have tried to demonstrate, our one and two child families are less economically constrained than larger families because of their largely urban, educated and upper income situation12. What would lead these upper income households to limit fertility under conditions of economic growth?
Because of this new belief, the population would be likely to keep declining, which could have tragic repercussions for China in the coming decades. What all this suggests is that this very low fertility is largely an expression of the same (although stronger) motives for fertility decline in general. In turn, these motivations are related to rising parental aspirations for children and for their own consequent social mobility (analogous to explanations for fertility decline in the 1970s and 1980s in China – Greenhalgh 1988).
A consumption index based on these goods has been created by adding up 23 assets and amenities (for a further description, see Desai et al, 2010). Since one-child families are concentrated at the upper end of the income distribution, it is not surprising that one-child families have more assets (9.7 of a total of 23) than larger families (7.8 assets). However, the theoretical argument hinges on comparing families at the same income level. The IHDS is unique in developing country surveys in collecting detailed income data from 56 sources of income including farming, livestock, business, wage labor, family and non-family transfers. In order to understand the correlates of this emerging one child family, this paper analyses data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005 (IHDS). This survey was organized by researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi (Desai et al. 2010).
Our contention is that in modern India, the nature of economic development in recent decades has had much to do with the growing recourse to very low fertility that is the subject of this paper. While education, income etc. have the expected relationship with these various indicators of personal freedom and expression, for virtually none of the outcomes studied do women with one child have a substantially greater amount of freedom or greater degree of conjugal intimacy than women with larger families. For one marker, the index measuring frequency of discussion between the couple, women with a single child in fact have a lower level of couple communication, suggesting that children possibly form an important topic of parental conversation and increase rather than decrease conjugal intimacy.
Effects of the OCP on fertility and
For this analysis, their income is set to zero and a dummy variable indicating income of less than zero is included. These farmers are actually somewhat better off than other farmers as shown by the positive coefficient for this variable. While this figure does not imply that they will necessarily stop at one child, it nevertheless reflects a new kind of ambiguity – many more women than expected are now willing to even entertain the possibility of stopping at one. That is, is our five year cut off merely too short a birth interval in today’s’ world? IHDS data for the distribution of second birth intervals in our sample show that over 90% of the birth intervals fall within the 5 year cut off we use. Apart from Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka are also moving towards adopting the two-child policyin India.
The emergence of the one-child family in India
- They also fill the “parent-as friend” role more strongly, given the absence of siblings.
- Many orphanages witnessed an influx of baby girls, as families would abandon them in favor of having a male child.15 Many families also kept their illegal children hidden so that they would not be punished by the government.185 In fact, “out adoption” was not uncommon in China even before birth planning.
- Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”.
- Last month, the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development, and Reproductive Health ended an important series of hearings on the impact of population growth on the millennium development goals.
- According to the Reserve Bank of India, India’s percentage in poverty is way over the world average.
An interesting ethical question is, if it is allowed and desirable to limit human rights (sexual and reproductive rights) to promote decent life and economic development. China decided 32 years ago to implement a rigorous family-planning policy and they will still be affected by this decision during the coming years. The policy first enhanced economic growth through a lower dependency ratio, which even led to the opening of a demographic window. But the accelerated ageing of the population yields an increasing old dependency ratio. China has already undergone major changes and addressed challenges with drastic answers- the One Child Policy is one example.
Reports surfaced of Chinese women giving birth to their second child overseas, a practice known as birth tourism. Likewise, a Hong Kong passport differs from China’s mainland passport by providing additional advantages.example needed one child policy in india Recentlywhen? though, the Hong Kong government has drastically reduced the quota of births set for non-local women in public hospitals.
The governmental rules and regulation lawfully hinder the number of infants the weeded couples ought to have. Last month, the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development, and Reproductive Health ended an important series of hearings on the impact of population growth on the millennium development goals. Experts from around the world called on the UK’s Department for International Development and the international community to give much greater emphasis to population and family planning. In April 1992, China implemented laws that enabled foreigners to adopt their orphan children, with the number of children each orphanage could offer for international adoption being limited by the China Center of Adoption Affairs.
Both are more likely to invest in children’s education than larger families but parents of a single child are even more invested in this child than families with two children. This suggests that one need not look for the emergence of post-modern aspirations and ideologies for below-replacement families in countries like India. The motives underlying the first demographic transition do not respect the arbitrary floor of a TFR of 2 that demographers have set up. The continuing global decline in fertility in the 21st century has led to mixed reactions.
- The sample is spread over 1503 villages and 971 urban blocks in 33 states and union territories.
- Leaders of two southern states – Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – have recently advocated more children.
- But the booming population has been raising concerns for decades due to a rising poverty, decline in jobs and a poor literacy rate.
- This exercise will redraw electoral boundaries to reflect population shifts, likely reducing parliamentary seats for the economically prosperous southern states.
As a superpower, China is interested in facilitating birth amongst a chosen few; while India continues with its ambivalent posture on the domestic use of in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies, prohibiting the transnational traffic of ‘unsuitable foreigners’ and ‘nonheteronormative families’ to avail of the same. Most importantly, by aggressively participating in regulating the use of these technologies, the Indian and Chinese states are also keenly redefining the intimate lives of their citizenry. This is seen most pointedly in the recent change in the shifts in the one-child policy of the Chinese state, and the newly drafted Indian Surrogacy Bill. In the late 20th century, both countries woke up to the need to manage the fallout of their population policies.