The two-child norm conundrum

ANDHRA PRADESH Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has added a new angle to the public discourse on population. Unlike the demands being raised in parts of north India to penalise couples with more children, Naidu wants couples in his state to have more than two kids. The state government plans to incentivise families with more kids and encourage couples to have more children. As the first step, the state government has repealed laws and regulations that prevented people with more than two children from contesting municipal and panchayat elections. Naidu says he will bring in legislation so that only those with more than two children will be eligible to contest local body elections.

The Andhra Pradesh Government plans to incentivise families with more kids and encourage couples to have more children.

The reason given by the CM for this surprise policy is two-fold — a decline in the population growth rate (TFR), as reflected in the drop in the total fertility rate, and an increase in the ageing population in the state. He says that the population growth rate in AP is 1.6 per cent — much below the national rate of 2.1 per cent. In addition, the proportion of people above 60 is 11 per cent and is projected to rise to 19 per cent by 2047. In many villages of some districts, he says, only elderly people are left as the working population has migrated to other parts of the country or gone abroad.

For a CM in the world’s most populous country to plead couples to have more children may sound incredulous at first, but it is not without logic or precedent. China, after following the draconian one-child norm for decades, has abandoned coercive policies as it faces a likely shortage of working hands. Many European countries as well as Japan are facing the same predicament. The situation in India, however, is different. While the population is stabilising in southern states, it is still rising in large states in the Hindi belt.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. A study of population trends in 204 countries, published in the medical journal The Lancet in May 2024, reported that fertility rates have dropped dramatically around the world since 1950. The trend is projected to continue in most of the countries till the end of the century. The global TFR in 1950 was over 4.8 births per female and it has dropped to about 2.2 in 2021. It is projected to drop further to 1.8 by 2050 and 1.6 in 2100. However, comparatively high fertility rates in six low-income countries and subnational areas will result in a demographic divide between them and the rest of the world. The emerging scenario of contraction and ageing of the population, the study concluded, has serious implications for health systems, social security programmes, and the labour force. These trends will trigger shifts in global population dynamics, international relations and the geopolitical environment as well.

While the drop in the population growth rate is a global phenomenon over a long period and that is what states like Andhra are beginning to experience, what matters is the policy response to this trend. India was a pioneer in launching a national family planning programme in 1961, discarding the earlier clinic-based approach to birth control. It focused on public health outreach and extension, and birth control methods like vasectomy and condoms. The ‘hum do, humare do’ dictum was popularised through education and communication in the community. Despite high illiteracy rates, a target-based approach and excessive focus on the sterilisation of women, the programme helped spread the idea of birth control. The first legally coercive measure came in the mid-1990s in the form of laws and policies in several states to disqualify a person with more than two children from contesting local body elections. Some states went a step further and made candidates with more than two children ineligible for government jobs.

In 2019, Uttar Pradesh drafted the Population Control Bill proposing that couples with more than two children be made ineligible for government jobs as well as government subsidies and facilities. It was later withdrawn and replaced with the Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill that incentivised families with two children for housing subsidies, loans and other welfare schemes.

Both kinds of policy responses — the one to disincentivise large families and the other proposed by Naidu — are skewed and do not consider core issues relating to women’s health, reproductive freedom of choice, the right to fertility and gender inequality. The legal measures to either restrict the number of children — or increase them, as suggested by the CM — impact women and their employment opportunities as well as political representation, given the societal disadvantages they already face. As it is, the onus of contraception is almost fully on women — be it sterilisation or producing more children in future. Moreover, The Lancet study has noted that policies like cash transfers, tax incentives and childcare subsidies to promote the birth of more children have done little to achieve rebounds in fertility.

Instead of coercive solutions like China’s one-child norm, seeking to restrict the number of children to two or incentivising the birth of more children in southern states, we need to bring the focus back on core drivers of fertility — women’s education, access to health services and contraceptives. These not only impact fertility rates but will also have larger societal benefits through the empowerment of women and their participation in economic activities. Along with this, we need policies to promote the health of the elderly and their reskilling to achieve the goal of healthy and productive ageing.

Another set of policies will have to address migration within and outside the country. We also need to consider the impact of climate change on food security and water availability while drawing up population policies. Naidu has flagged a critical issue that needs a serious public discourse and urgent government action, beginning with the conduct of the national Census. Without data, we will be groping in the dark.