Fertility faultlines: The unsolved puzzle of why Indian women are having fewer babies

As the world’s most populous nation, changes in the way India is growing deeply affect the world. Yet these key shifts are not adequately documented or discussed, both within India and globally.

At Data For India, we track these changes closely, using high-quality Indian and global data sources. Through this three-part series, we attempt to pull together vital Indian data on demographic shifts, place them within the context of other socio-economic changes taking place in India, and set them against a global backdrop. With this, we identify new areas of research as well as directions for policy and discussion.

In Part I, we brought together the data to describe the current moment, and the key recent data points that we argue have gone relatively unnoticed. In Part II, we examine data around falling birth rates, and share research that suggests India is both an outlier and a part of a global trend. In Part III, we will look at the data on demographic differences between Indian states and how it feeds into current socio-economic and political tensions.

Of all of the dimensions of population change – falling fertility, growing life expectancy, migration, epidemiological transitions – few seem to capture public imagination as much as the number of children a woman has. Real or perceived high fertility rates among some groups and falling fertility among others has emerged as a cultural flashpoint with resonances far beyond demography conferences, and has come to be a major part of media and political debate in India as well as the rest of the world.

In this piece, we look at five key aspects of changing fertility rates in India using a combination of high-quality Indian and global data and discuss how India is part of a global trend in many ways, but also an important outlier in some aspects of fertility.

We use the United Nations World Population Prospects, 2024 Revision, for global data. We use population projections from India’s 2011 Census, the Sample Registration System, and the National Family Health Survey for Indian data.

1. TFR in India is now below replacement nationally

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the average number of children that a woman is likely to have in her lifetime. When a country's TFR drops to 2.1, meaning that women will have an average of 2.1 children over their lifetimes, demographers say that the country has reached “replacement fertility”.

If two adults have a notional 2.1 children between them, then, accounting for some likelihood of death during childhood or adolescence, that couple will produce two adults, and the size of the population will remain the same. This is a key milestone in a country’s demographic journey. If fertility falls below that level, the population will begin to decline in absolute numbers.

By Indian estimates, TFR fell below replacement in 2019, with TFR in urban India reaching this milestone much earlier in 2004. TFR in rural India is also estimated to have fallen below replacement as of 2023, the most recent year for which official Indian data is available.

Indian national data on fertility comes from the annual Sample Registration System, a large sample nationally representative household survey. The most recent Sample Registration System data is for 2023. While the Sample Registration System produces estimates for rural and urban India and for Indian states, it does not produce estimates by socio-economic characteristics including education levels, income group, or social group. For this, we use India’s nationally representative National Family Health Survey, part of the Demographic and Health Surveys system. India’s most recent National Family Health Survey was conducted in 2019-’21. The National Family Health Survey’s estimates of TFR are slightly higher than the Sample Registration System data for the same year.

Across the world, TFR is higher among poorer and less educated groups, and then falls over time as those groups get richer and better educated. In India too, TFR was highest among the poorest 20% of Indian households, where the average woman had an estimated one child more on average than the average woman in the richest 20% of households. The gap between less and more educated women is similar: women with no schooling have an average of one child more than women with 12 or more years of schooling. However, over time, TFR has fallen in both richer and poorer households, and among women with more and less education.

TFR is also higher among women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes – marginalised communities that face caste-based discrimination and disadvantages – as compared to women from privileged caste groups. A sharper cleavage in India, however, is the higher TFR of Muslim women as compared to other religious groups and Hindu women in particular.

TFR among Muslim women has consistently been higher than for other religious groups, correlated with the substantially lower household income of Muslim households in India. While continuing to be higher than the TFR among other religious groups, fertility rates for Muslim women have fallen substantially too.

Moreover, in India’s richer states where household incomes are higher and women’s education rates are higher, fertility rates are lower for all groups, including both Hindus and Muslims. TFR among Muslim women in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, among India’s richest states with the lowest fertility, is lower than it is among Hindu women in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India’s poorer states with higher fertility.

2. TFR has been below replacement for a long time in some parts of the country

The recency of India’s national TFR falling below replacement levels can make India seem like a new entrant to the global conversation on falling birth rates. However, certain regions have been living with fertility rates that are as low as in parts of the developed world for several decades now.

Kerala was the first Indian state to reach replacement fertility in 1988, when the national TFR was still 4. Tamil Nadu followed five years later in 1993, and Andhra Pradesh a decade after Tamil Nadu in 2004. West Bengal in India’s east is an outlier in terms of fertility – despite being one of India’s poorest states, the state reached replacement fertility in 2005.

This is more so the case in the urban parts of Indian states. By 2023, TFR was below replacement levels in all Indian states except for Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Even so, public and political conversation around falling fertility is relatively new even in the southern states, despite over two decades of experience of low birth rates. In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu in January suggested disqualifying candidates for local elections if they had fewer than two children, as an incentive for families to have more children. Yet, until just three months before Naidu’s suggestion, the state had debarred people with more than two children from contesting local elections. (That legislation was scrapped in October 2024, thirty years after it was first brought in).

3. Falling fertility in India is driven by women having fewer children sooner rather than having more children later

In most of the developed world, falling fertility manifests as women having fewer children later in life. In India, however, falling fertility plays out in the form of women continuing to have their children relatively early, but then stopping after two children and not having more children later in life.

Over the past two decades, the age at which women have their first child has grown only slightly, by less than two years; the median Indian mother now has her first child at just over 21 years. This tracks closely with changes in the age at which Indian women get married, which is just over 18 years.

What has changed significantly, however, is the age at which women have their last child. As families become smaller, more women are completing all their pregnancies in their twenties. As a result, the median age at which an Indian mother has her last child has fallen more substantially, by more than five years.

Across the world, as incomes and access to education rise, women begin to marry slightly later and have children later. While this is taking place in India as well, the majority of births every year in India are still to women who are in their 20s, as compared to, for example, the United Kingdom where women now have their first child much later, and most births are now to women in their 30s.

However, the change in India is apparent as well. Since the 1950s, the majority of births every year in India have been to women in their early 20s. The United Nations’ population estimates suggest that this likely changed in the last few years, and that the largest share of annual births in India is now to women in their late 20s.

4. Why is fertility falling in India and in the world?

Global scholarship around low birth rates has tended to be country or region-specific and, excluding India from the analysis, has not just missed one-sixth of humanity, but has also resulted in a skewed, and less-than-universal theory of why birth rates are falling.

In their 2025 book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, for the first time, assemble high quality data from across the world to understand why fertility really is falling. In North America and Europe, the opportunity costs for women who temporarily or permanently withdraw from the workforce to have children are substantial and demonstrable, Spears and Geruso argue. But this simply doesn’t hold in India.

“It might be tempting, especially after considering the opportunity costs of careers, to think that we’ve arrived at a grand theory of fertility decline: Low birth rates simply and invariably arrive if and because women attain the freedom and power to pursue careers. But it turns out that this cannot be the one grand theory,” they write. “Consider India. The path that India has taken to low fertility is a challenge to this grand theory of fertility decline – and most of the other grand theories of fertility decline, too.”

As Spears and Geruso point out, there is no universal pattern here. Most adult women in India don’t work for pay outside the home, while most women in East Asia or Europe do, but at similar birth rates. In the same graph, there are also countries with higher rates of labour force participation than India, and higher birth rates as well. The age at which Indian women have their children is also lower in India than in East Asia, North America or Europe, meaning that women delaying childbirth for their careers is also not an explanation for falling fertility here. “In India, low fertility is happening without a conflict between parenting and women’s careers,” Spears and Geruso write.

Why then are birth rates falling in India and elsewhere? Spears and Geruso argue against a grand theory and make the case that there is much that we do not know about low birth rates, in part, complicated by India, which nullifies popular hypotheses in the western world, including the rise of liberalism and feminism, the decline of marriage and religion, and the rise in women’s participation in the workforce.

Instead, they argue that the world has gotten better in many different, small, and big ways that make the opportunity cost of having children too great. These include both economic opportunity costs, but also intangibles – simply put, the growing pleasures of having more time to do more of the nice things that people would like to do. “Whatever matters to someone – which includes values old and new – “having several children” now would cost a larger deduction from “having what matters to me” than ever before,” they write.

Coercive population controls also do not significantly alter fertility patterns in the long-run, Spears and Geruso argue. Despite the argument of southern Indian politicians that their states have low fertility rates as a result of successfully implemented family planning programs, what’s far more likely is that these states are merely on the same trajectory as the rest of the world, with India’s poorer states just a little lower down on the same ladder.

5. What is the future of fertility in India?

The United Nations Population Division publishes a revision to its World Population Prospects every two years. Its most recent revision in 2024 suggests that India’s fertility rate will now fall gradually for the next 75 years for which the UN has made projections. At the projected rates of fertility and mortality, India’s population is expected to decline in absolute terms from 2060 onward.

This is similar to UN projections for other countries, where the estimates broadly predict fertility to decline only slowly over the next 75 years and to remain at roughly between 1.5 and 2. South Korea is one of the only countries in the world where TFR is now below 1; here the UN estimates that TFR will rebound slightly to rise over 1, and then remain over 1 for the rest of this century.

However, fertility could continue to fall lower than the UN’s current estimates. India’s own population projections are dated as a result of having been made off the 2011 Census. These projections suggest that by 2035, at least seven major Indian states including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir will have a TFR of 1.5. These projections are also likely to be under-estimates; the TFR of states like Bihar was, by 2023, already significantly lower than the 2011 projections.

Some Indian politicians and demographers are beginning to acknowledge the challenges of low birth rates, and are beginning to suggest policies that might be needed to reverse this. However, history suggests that reversals will not happen easily, in part, because the discussion in India is often based on a faulty reading of its demographic history and the belief that public policy lowered fertility in the first place.

Since 1950, there have been 26 countries where the TFR has fallen below 1.9, Spears and Geruso find. “Never, in any one of these twenty-six countries, has the lifetime birth rate again risen to a level high enough to stabilise the population. Not in Canada, not in Japan, not in Scotland, not in Taiwan. Not for people born in any year. In some of these countries, governments believe they have policies to promote and support parenting. But all of them continue to have birth rates below two.”

Indian politicians appear to be toying with exhortations and incentives as twin strategies to raise birth rates. The evidence suggests that neither strategy is likely to work. In the absence of a reversal then, there are monumental implications for Indian society to consider.

The first of these is the spectre of an altered age structure, and its implications for society and the economy (Part 3 of this series deals with this topic, at the state level in particular).

Then there is also the impact that this could have on the lives of Indian women, and their interaction with the labour force in particular.

The share of adult Indian women who report that they are either working or looking for work is less than half that of men, and substantially lower than in most of the rest of the world. Women who report that they are out of the labour force are taking care of their households – both unpaid housework as well as unpaid care work principally of their children.

The gap between labour force participation rates for men and women in India is largest in their late 20s, when childbirth and child-rearing responsibilities peak for Indian women. As Indian women complete pregnancies within a shorter span, this shorter window of fertility could make women available to the labour market sooner. However, as the age at which women have their first child starts to rise, as it has elsewhere in the world, the timing of women’s entry or re-entry into the labour force could also shift in time.

There is also the question of the aspirations of a society that chooses to have fewer children in the hope of a better life for both those children and themselves, and how these can be met. If Indian women are not having fewer children because of labour market factors, the choices they appear to be making for a more enjoyable life will need a proper reckoning. This has implications for the quality of education, healthcare, and the environment, but also on leisure, travel, art and the public sphere.

Whether declining birth rates should be reversed is an ideological project, and whether it can be reversed is currently entirely unproven. But in a short-to-medium term future in which declining birth rates are a reality, being on the right side of the evidence and clear-sighted about the consequences are urgent next steps for India.

Rukmini S is the founder of Data For India (where she leads research and writing) and a CASI Non-Resident Fellow. Her areas of focus include demography, health, and household economics. She has previously led data journalism in Indian newsrooms and is the author of Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (Westland, 2021).

The article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.