Hopes, Dreams and Anxieties: Indias One-Child Families

If a significant cultural transformation and renegotiation of gender roles must precede below replacement fertility, this appears to be far in the future for India, particularly in the populous north-central states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar (Desai et al, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the overpopulation issue of India and propose recommendations on how to overcome it. First, the paper summarizes the crucial demographic conditions and where India stands by numbers. Then the article presents the development of the state approach to the issue starting from the early years of independence up to the current policies.

The Pros of a Child Limit in India

• In spite of the emerging phenomenon of one-child families in India, this is by no means a large group.
• But the absence of this relationship suggests that role incompatibility is unlikely to be an important motivating factor in families restricting themselves to one child.
• These farmers are actually somewhat better off than other farmers as shown by the positive coefficient for this variable.
• 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).

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. Whether an ageing China can be a rising China will be decided by the actions made by the government and their ability to adapt to the new situation. Whether the positive impact of the One Child Policy is coming to an end and if it might be time to adjust China’s population-control policies will be discussed in this paper. By focusing on women with at least one child, we take into account primary sterility (ADD FN ON UNISA WORK).

Increased Age For Girls Marriage

The IHDS collected detailed data on women’s and men’s labor force participation, including work in various one child policy in india sectors of the economy (Desai et al. 2010). Table 5 shows predicted probabilities from logistic regressions of family size on women’s labor force participation, separately for all work (including work on family farm and in family business) and for wage work. This regression controls for a variety of socio-economic background factors and place of residence.9 In order to address the endogeneity of income, family income in this analysis excludes women’s wage income. For all work, i.e. combining work on family farm, caring for livestock, and work in family business and wage work, women with a single child are actually less likely to be employed than women with larger families.

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). This is a nationally representative sample of 41,554 households and interviews with 33,583 ever-married women aged 15–49.

The emergence of the one-child family in India

• However, this decision remains contingent and about 27% said they may want another child at some point5.
• Birth rates in other states with high Muslim populations have also declined, but at a slower rate.
• As IHDS data show, about 95% of the marriages are arranged and almost all of them take place endogamously within caste, thereby privileging caste and extended kin networks over individual identities.
• Resulting familial, kinship and policy shifts are paramount in the ways in which China and India are approaching reproductive technologies and demographic transformation.
• First, the growth of a new Indian middle class has a peculiar feature that is distinct from the growth of the middle classes in Europe and United States.

Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, celebrated the survey results as proof of the power of persuasion over more direct interventions such as China’s notorious one-child policy. Given Australia’s growing ties to India, it should be concerned about what population policy could mean for the erosion of democratic norms in India. But the notion that India should emulate China’s past population policies is misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.

844 thoughts on “The Cons of a Child Limit in India”

The prevalence of nuclear families among households with one, two, or more children is about 50% in our sample. This contradicts the expectation that intergenerational relations are less central to family functioning in the single child household than they are in higher fertility homes. Easterlin argued that for the same level of income, those who have higher consumption aspirations may be more likely to focus on material consumption at the expense of having a large family. Conversely those with high consumption aspirations may meet their consumption needs by curtailing fertility when faced with the prospect of low income generated by poor economic conditions. Could it be that the one-child families have delayed the birth of the first child until it is too late to have a second birth, given the age specific curve of fecundity? Table 3 shows that women who begin childbearing after age 30 are far more likely to end up with a single child than women who begin childbearing early, lending some credence to the declining fecundity and secondary sterility argument.

There is little doubt that we need newer and more nuanced research paradigms than the ones informed by earlier understandings of population rhetoric. We need to understand the emerging familial configurations of third-party donor families facilitated through IVF, commercial surrogacy and bride-shortage related marriage migration and inter-generational care deficit among the many other social phenomena that are resulting from newer demographic trends. However, there is little evidence of sharp increases in individualistic attitudes or post-modern mentalities. While a growing literature on the Indian middle classes notes rising aspirations and consumerism, it also notes the continued hold of social institutions like caste and community on individual behaviors, particularly with regards to gender roles (Fernandes 2000, Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009). Marriage remains almost universal and largely arranged by the extended family (Desai and Andrist 2010) and caste based inequalities continue to hold sway in the formation of the social networks and access to opportunities (Deshpande 2011, Thorat and Newman 2009).

Prevalence of young children in polygynous households in sub-Saharan Africa

Note that less than 2% of the IHDS families indicated that their annual income is less than the money invested in farming. These are mostly families with orchards and other large farmers whose incomes are often biannual. 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.

Like past population control policies, they’re targeted at Muslim and lower-caste families, and illustrate a broader Hindu nationalist agenda with anti-democratic tendencies. At the end of the day, all these investments pay off, because children who attend private schools and obtain private tutoring are also more proficient when tested for schooling outcomes – they perform somewhat better on all kinds of tests of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic’ (Desai et al. 2009). We do not have data to check if they are also more emotionally and socially proficient, but they are certainly more suited to take advantage of the new opportunities in the economy.

The remaining 94% began childbearing well within their peak fecundity period and had an opportunity to go on to a second child if they chose to4. As happened at the height of China’s one-child policy, Indians could lose government jobs and more if such laws were passed at the national level. Some Indian states and municipalities have already legislated that people with more than two children are ineligible for government jobs and to stand for political office.

It does so by scrutinizing its cultural, economic and social factors and implications of overpopulation and identifies socioeconomic backwardness, early marriages and family norms, lack of adequate health care infrastructure and education as the correlated and interdependent features supporting the trend of overpopulation. The authors come up with three recommendations to tackle the issue – women empowerment, education and industrialization. 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.

But regardless of the initial motivation, we find that smaller families invest more in children’s education than larger families. This suggests that the familial desire to invest in children’s education and thereby enhance social mobility is very strong. Whether smaller families are causes or consequences of this thirst for child specific investments, the fact that the main substantial differences we see in familial lifestyles for different parities are those observable for child outcomes is highly significant. This suggests that as we look for the pathways to low fertility in societies with strong family ties, we may need to focus on parental aspirations for their children rather than for themselves. A deliberate retreat from childbearing is arguably the central component of the second demographic transition (SDT) in Europe and is what the theorizing on the STD is largely about.