Today, India’s most popular headline about its population is simple: The average woman is having about two children over her lifetime. That single figure has become a shorthand for “India has reached replacement-level fertility”, and in one sense it is true. But successive Sample Registration System (SRS) and National Family Health Survey (NFHS) rounds tell us something that should make us pause: India has achieved below-replacement fertility despite the near universality of marriage — only about 1 per cent of women remain never married by ages 45-49, the median age at first birth is a mere 21.2 years, and childbearing is virtually imposed within marriage with a lower socio-economic status, a demographic pathway that sharply contrasts with the experience of most other low-fertility countries.
Therefore, this is not the classic story of low birth rates driven by late marriage or people choosing not to marry. India has managed to reach low fertility while most women are still marrying and starting families relatively early and sterilising too early. So what, exactly, is inside that two-children average and does it tell us the whole truth?
Within all these changes, there is an uncomfortable fact to face: When it comes to measuring birth rates, the widely used total fertility rate (TFR-average number of births per woman) counts all births, including births that women did not plan or want, as well as births that happen because families keep trying until they get a son. Thus, the measure of TFR hides the actual fertility intentions of families, especially women in India.
The births that were not on the family’s list
Demographers have a name for the part of fertility that represents births women actually wanted: The “wanted fertility rate”. The idea is simple. If you count only the births that match what women themselves say they intended, their preferred family size can be obtained. Thus, you get a true picture of where India’s birth rate is really headed in five to 10 years from now.
The gap between wanted and actual fertility has narrowed substantially over the years but remains significant. Nationally, women have an average of 2.0 children, while their desired family size is about 1.6, leaving a gap of 0.4 children per woman. Around eight states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Assam, and Haryana — many of them called medium-high fertility states) have a gap of more than .30 children per woman, where many women continue to have more children than they intend.
India’s strange contraception paradox
Here is where India gets genuinely unusual. The country has managed to bring birth rates down to near-replacement levels, and yet millions of women still can’t reliably prevent pregnancies they don’t want. How can both be true?
The answer lies in how Indian women control their fertility. India’s family planning system has worked, but it has worked mostly at the end of the road: Women have children, reach their desired family size (often after one or two), and then stop permanently using sterilisation. What’s largely missing are the tools that help young couples space their children to delay a first birth, or wait a few years between children. When family planning arrives late, unintended pregnancies tend to cluster in the early years of marriage, among the youngest women. This also reflects in relatively poor maternal and child health in the country compared to their counterparts in low fertility settings.
Informed choice around sterilisation also remains partial. When women whose sterilisation was, in a meaningful sense, not a fully informed choice are counted alongside women with unmet need, India’s “unwanted family planning” problem looks considerably larger than the headline numbers suggest.
The son every family is still waiting for
There is another force propping up India’s birth numbers: Son preference. In several states, many families don’t stop having children after one or two, they stop after they’ve had a son. This preference leaves a visible fingerprint in the data. Analyses of NFHS microdata from the 1990s found that a disproportionate share of “unwanted” births — the births that happened beyond what women said they wanted — were daughters. Families were, in effect, having extra children in the hope the next one would be a boy, and when a girl arrived, she was more likely to be described, after the fact, as a birth they hadn’t really planned.
As son preference weakens — and slowly, it is weakening, particularly among younger and more educated families — this hidden fertility inflation will naturally deflate. Fewer families will keep going “for a son”. Birth rates in India will continue to fall, not because anyone is imposing limits, but because one of the social pressures pushing families toward extra children is losing its grip.
What India should watch
Despite what has been said above, India’s fertility decline story is not yet a crisis. It is a policy story, one about helping women and couples align their actual lives with their intended ones, whether they want to have a child or not. Unintended pregnancies have already fallen reasonably from 21 per cent in 2005-06 to 8 per cent in 2019-21 — the latest figures from NFHS-6 (2023-24) are yet to be made public. That is a quiet public-health success although the problem has not ended yet.
If unmet need for family planning continues to fall, if spacing methods reach young couples who need them most, and if son preference keeps fading, India’s birth rate will fall further on its own. Not because families are being pressured, but because many of the births that currently hold the number up were never truly planned in the first place.
The baby India didn’t plan for may become rarer in future. That is worth paying attention to. The more pressing concern now is the recent decline in the use of modern contraceptive methods, which risks leaving the country’s remaining unwanted-fertility gap in place even as the headline TFR falls. This becomes more critical when only 30 per cent of women seek a second birth on their own.
India needs to monitor fertility preferences, both intended and unintended births, and ensure that couples are able to realise their own choices instead of overall birth rates.
Goli is Associate Professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences and the author of A Treatise on Families in Contemporary India and James is a demographer and professional specialist at Princeton University. Views are Personal
