Total fertility rate (TFR) indicates the average number of children expected to be born to a woman during her reproductive span of 15-49 years. The government’s Sample Registration System in 22 states shows that TFR for India declined to 2.2 in 2017 after being stable at 2.3 between 2013 and 2016.

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Reasons for falling fertility rate:

• Higher education, increased mobility, late marriage, financially independent women, overall prosperity are all contributing to a falling TFR.
• It goes below 2 in both urban and rural areas, where girls complete schooling and reduces further as they pass college.
• Bihar, with the highest TFR of 3.2, had the maximum percentage of illiterate women at 26.8%, while Kerala, where the literacy rate among women is 99.3%, had among the lowest fertility rates.
• Increased focus on family planning by use of Contraceptives, increased tubectomies and relatively lesser vasectomies have also contributed to the reducing TFR.
• Urbanization, reduced joint family system, increasing nuclear and single-parent families, higher cost of living in urban areas and higher wages have discouraged aspiring parents to reduce the number of kids.
• Working people in urban areas want better pay, implying that they have to reduce the number of children so as to increase the time they spend at their workplace.
• As more cities come up, people move for jobs and employment tenure gets shorter, TFR may fall further.

Decreasing fertility rate and its challenges:

• The decrease in fertility and the associated decrease in the dependency ratio, in turn lead to an increase in the share of the population concentrated in the working ages and hence in the ratio of the working age to the non-working age population.
• Dependency ratio:
  • The proportion of workers rises sharply, even as the proportion of dependants falls. In many countries, the ratio of workers to dependents goes up, giving a huge boost to per capita income.
  • India will see a significant rise in working age adults India’s dependency ratio that is the number of dependents to working people is low at 0.6, compared with the developed countries. That ratio is going to decline further with fertility rates continuing to fall.
• For the next few decades India will have a youthful, dynamic and productive workforce than the rest of the world.
• A demographic trend where the proportion of persons aged 15-24 in the population increases significantly compared to other age groups which paired with limited employment opportunities may contribute to increased poverty, hunger, malnutrition, poorer health, lower educational outcomes, child labour, unsupervised and abandoned children, and rising rates of domestic violence.
• Education constraints:
  • There are serious problems with Indian higher education. These include a shortage of high quality faculty, poor incentive structures, lack of good regulation
  • India is home to the world’s largest concentration of illiterate people in the world
• Health:
  • At the primary level, there are also serious problems with health and nutrition that impact the effectiveness of education and the capacity for learning.
  • In future large proportion of older working aged people who face longer periods of retirement, accumulate assets to support themselves.

Way forward:

• Health and education parameters need to be improved substantially to make the Indian workforce efficient and skilled.
• Enhance, support and coordinate private sector initiatives for skill development through appropriate Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models; strive for significant operational and financial involvement from the private sector
• Focus on underprivileged sections of society and backward regions of the country thereby enabling a move out of poverty; similarly, focus significantly on the unorganized or informal sector workforce.
• Measures should have pan Indian presence and not just concentrated in metropolitan cities as most of the workforce is likely to come from the rural hinterland.
• Investing in people through healthcare, quality education, jobs and skills helps build human capital, which is key to supporting economic growth, ending extreme poverty, and creating more inclusive societies
• New technology could be exploited to accelerate the pace of building human capital, including massive open online courses and virtual classrooms
• Policymakers should have a greater incentive to redouble their efforts to promote human capital so that it can contribute to economic growth and job creation