India’s Demographics and the Total Fertility Rate

For many, many years, this was my slide on India’s TFR in lectures I used to give on India’s demographics:

What is TFR? Here’s Wikipedia:

“The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if:

1. she were to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) through her lifetime
2. she were to live from birth until the end of her reproductive life.”

Hans Rosling had a better, more intuitive term: babies per women. Here’s an excellent chart from Gapminder, although ever so slightly outdated:

Here’s the excellent Our World In Data page about the topic, and here’s a lovely visualization of how the TFR has changed for the world and for India over time (please make sure to “play” the animation):

(I hope this renders on your screens the way it is supposed to. If not, my apologies, and please click here instead)

But now we have news: India’s TFR has now slipped below the replacement rate. Here’s Vivek Kaul in Livemint explaining what this means:

The recently released National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) of 2019-2021 shows why. As per the survey, India’s total fertility rate now stands at 2. It was 3.2 at the turn of the century and 2.2 in 2015-2016, when the last such survey was done. This means that, on average, 100 women had 320 children during their child-bearing years (aged 15-49). It fell to 220 and now stands at 200.
Hence, India’s fertility rate is already lower than the replacement level of 2.1. If, on average, 100 women have 210 children during their childbearing years and this continues over the decades, the population of a country eventually stabilizes. The additional fraction of 0.1 essentially accounts for females who die before reaching child-bearing age.

https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/the-women-who-went-missing-in-our-demographic-dividend-11652200177580.html

And here’s the breakup by state, updated for the latest results:

Of course, as with all averages, so also with this one: you can weave many different stories based on how you slice the data. You can slice it by urban/rural divides, you can slice it by states, you can slice it by level of education, you can slice it by religion – and each of these throws up a different point of view and a different story.

But there are three important things (to me) that are worth noting:

1. The TFR for India has not just come down over time, but has slipped below the global TFR in recent years.
2. This doesn’t (yet) mean that India’s population will start to come down right away, and that for a variety of reasons. As Vivek Kaul puts it:
   “So, what does this mean? Will the Indian population start stabilizing immediately? The answer is no. This is primarily because the number of women who will keep entering child-bearing age will grow for a while, simply because of higher fertility rates in the past. Also, with access to better medical facilities, people will live longer. Hence, India’s population will start stabilizing in around three decades.”
3. The next three to four decades is a period of “never again” high growth opportunity for India, because never again (in all probability) will we ever have a young, growing population.

Demography is a subject you need to be more familiar with, and if you haven’t already, please begin with Our World in Data’s page on the topic, and especially spend time over the section titled “What explains the change in the number of children women have?”