How one-child families are transforming India

Punjab and Himachal Pradesh both have TFRs below 2 but only 3% of families seem to stop at one child. In contrast, Assam and West Bengal with TFRs of about 2.2 have 10–12% families who appear to have stopped at one child (on this regional variation, but using census data, see also Pradhan and Sekher, 2014)6. What all this suggests is that this very low fertility is largely an expression of the same (although stronger) motives for fertility decline in general. 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).

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At the moment, we do expect population heterogeneity in developing countries, but at the high fertility end; we assume that there is a floor below which fertility does not fall for any group in countries still to complete the first demographic transition. Shop Rolex Replica Watches UK | Free Delivery That this assumption is not really justified is certainly known from historical studies of very low fertility groups – the aristocracy in several parts of historical Europe for example (Johansson 1987). The demographic discourse on India has remained focused on the first demographic transition with relatively low expectations for below replacement fertility.

one child policy in india

Even when we restrict our focus to women engaged in wage work, where job conditions would place greater constraints on motherhood, we find few differences in women’s labor force participation by family size. While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. cheap Replica Watches UK paypal- Swiss Rolex Replica UK, Buy Cheap Fake Rolex Online Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition.

Competition from material consumption possibilities is of course not the only form of consumption constraint on high fertility. Indeed, when Blake (1968) sought to understand the relationship between income and family size, she focused on the non-monetary dimension of consumption (Blake 1968). In an insightful article, Keyfitz (1986) went in further detail about some of the factors that might explain what he called the ‘family that does not reproduce itself”. Instead of discussing on the opportunity costs of children in the usual directly economic way he focused on the non-monetary attractiveness one child policy in india of other ways of spending one’s time and one’s money. In this paper, use the Indian case to state that perhaps the conventional distinction between the first and second demographic transitions is unduly artificial3. Perhaps the move from TFRs of 3+ to 2 children is often merely a less extreme version of the move from 3+ to 1 child.

For every child free for adoption in India, 13 parents wait in line: Data

  • The authors come up with three recommendations to tackle the issue – women empowerment, education and industrialization.
  • Children in these still atypical but growing one-child families appear to be highly advantaged.
  • In Maharashtra, only 236 children are legally free for adoption, while 5,284 are in the CCIs.
  • At the moment, we do expect population heterogeneity in developing countries, but at the high fertility end; we assume that there is a floor below which fertility does not fall for any group in countries still to complete the first demographic transition.
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  • Note that had we found a relationship between the one child family and women’s labor force participation, we could still not have established the temporal supremacy of the work-family or family-work linkage.

Third, responses to fertility preferences and contraceptive use remain subject to measurement error, particularly since the interview setting often precludes privacy. However, a brief analysis of fertility preferences of women who have stopped at one child is instructive. About 73% of mothers with a single child said they did not want more children; 22% were sterilized. However, this decision remains contingent and about 27% said they may want another child at some point5.

  • Punjab and Himachal Pradesh both have TFRs below 2 but only 3% of families seem to stop at one child.
  • A demonstrated for Iran for example (Abbasi-Shavazi, Hosseini-Chavoshi, and McDonald 2007), declines in fertility can sometimes be accompanied by significant increases in the first birth interval; if that is also beginning to happen in India, we may be underestimating cohort fertility.
  • Note that less than 2% of the IHDS families indicated that their annual income is less than the money invested in farming.
  • In these regressions, in addition to parental characteristics and household income, we also control for child’s grade, gender and age.

(d) Aspirations for Social Mobility and Family Size

Still, in a country where an estimated 3.1 crore children were orphans according to the 2020 World Orphan Report, the fact that only a couple of thousands were identified as free for adoption is difficult to justify. In this paper we consistently show predicted values from multiple regression or logistic regression for outcomes of interest. These regressions control for woman’s age, education, place of residence, caste, household income and a dummy indicator for the state of residence.

one child policy in india

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The population increase has caused the country to undergo radical social, economic and political adjustment over the past thirty years. The government of China has intervened to address the social dilemma that has been brought out by the rapid population increase. Since the late 1970s, China’s administration has been enforcing a one child policy to control the existing population growth rate (Greenhalgh 311). The governmental rules and regulation lawfully hinder the number of infants the weeded couples ought to have.

Table 4.

In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex-selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, population of India is 1.32 billion, hitting the 1-billion mark. One place behind the world’s most populous city, China with 1.38 billion (The United Nations). Although the population has been a problem acknowledged by the government, it has been growing continuously, non-stop.

Table 3.

They also fill the “parent-as friend” role more strongly, given the absence of siblings. India is a country with a booming technology industry, one that relies on young people. There is fear that, by restricting the number of children that can be born, there will not be enough educated young people in the next generation to carry on India’s technological revolution.

Both countries are struggling with the legacy of harsh population policies, and stricter population controls in India could have disastrous consequences for women and minority communities. The Juvenile Justice Act (2021) lists out a time-bound procedure for a child in Child Care Institutions (CCI) to be declared legally free for adoption. Nobody is held accountable for not implementing”, says Smriti Gupta, co-founder of Where Are India’s Children, a Child Welfare and Action Foundation.

On all these counts, Indian families including one-child families, seem to operate on a very different and much more conventional dynamic – there is much less evidence of the social and behavioral modernization than one would expect from India’s educated middle class (Ravinder Kaur and Palriwala 2013). Although age at marriage is slowly inching up and the proportion of women who married before age 20 has declined from 58% in 2006 to 47% in 2012, the average age at marriage is still very low, only 21.2 in 2012 (Government of India 2013). 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. In China, the government found that once fertility rates dropped, they were faced with an ageing population. Even after relaxing birth control policies to allow all couples to have two children in 2015, and three children in 2021, birth rates remain low, particularly among the urban middle class favoured by the government.

Her arguments, distinct from the classic neo-classical economic approaches to the trade-off between child quality and quantity (Becker 1993; Schultz 1974), focus on the role of social and economic institutions in creating opportunities which can be exploited by parents to achieve social mobility. In spite of the emerging phenomenon of one-child families in India, this is by no means a large group. The growing literature on the growth of a middle class in India (Fernandes 2000) would suggest that elite Indians live lives that are closer to a global middle class in the West and participate in the kind of ideational transformation reflected in the second demographic transition.

Conversely, these families may reflect a growing heterogeneity in the Indian population and the average fertility will eventually become a balance of childbearing between highly motivated families and the remaining bulk of the population. In this case, will it be because the latter lacks the ambition for dreaming big dreams and is also hampered by cultural and institutional constraints on such dramatic fertility decline? The two main countries holding this population stock are China, closely followed by India, which is expected to surpass China in the near future. In India, which is the subject of this study, five different cities were visited in 2013 and so the discrepancies between the statistical data and the situations shown by the land itself were analyzed on-site.

Author
Brooklyn Simmons

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