The emergence of the one-child family in India-niussp

Agrawal and Unisa (2002) suggest that there may be emerging differentials in childlessness within the country, but we have not included childless women in this analysis. Indeed, Haub and Sharma (2015) believe that the country is almost at replacement level fertility already. Our results add to the growing body of literature on very low fertility that now notes diverse routes to low fertility. As we discussed above, this diversity is also implied in more recent understandings of sub-replacement fertility in parts of Europe and East Asia.

Mean age at effective marriage is about 21 years and 80% of the 15+ female population is married (Government of India 2013). So, as in the comparison with low fertility Europe, the one child family is unlikely to be an unplanned outcome of rising infecundity with age. In our Indian case, as already discussed, such involuntary constraints on second and subsequent births are less plausible because 94% of these one child families have had their single births before a maternal age of thirty; thus making a desire for a second child relatively easy to fulfil.

• We have tried to distinguish between families who are at parity one or two by accident and may yet move on to larger families and those who seem to remain at parities one and two by choice.
• 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.
• Private school enrollment and reliance on private tutoring have increased sharply in recent years (Kingdon 2007).
• 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.
• Signed in 1994, the declaration advocates free speech and honors the reproductive rights of couples to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children.

A veritable media industry has arisen in the US criticising the one child policy, although it chooses to overlook the tens of millions of coercive pregnancies in other countries where family planning and legal abortion are not available. The Bush administration refuses to fund the United Nations Population Fund because it works in China, even though this fund has never supported the one child policy. Deng Xiao-ping, the acknowledged architect of China's contemporary economic miracle, was a major sponsor of the 1979 policy.

"Virtual" population crisis

As activists and experts scramble to educate the public on the need for contraception and family planning, these politicians want to limit each family to have just two children. Dharini and Kunal Turakhia are careful to ensure that their only son, Dev, 11, spends time with his cousins, benefiting from the company while still having his parents all to himself. They also fill the “parent-as friend” role more strongly, given the absence of siblings. But you’ve probably noticed it already, if not in your own or extended family, then in your neighbourhood, among your former batchmates and current colleagues. And much of this booming population growth is happening in Uttar Pradesh, which —  if it were considered a country — would be the world's fifth-largest nation, just behind the US and Indonesia.

• Table 8 shows the differences in total educational expenditure in the year prior to the survey for 30,285 children ages 6–14.
• 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.
• India will surpass China as the country with the world’s largest population in 2023, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 report.
• The difference between a total fertility rate of 2.1, which might have been achieved without the policy, and a total fertility rate of 1.6 (found today) releases 24% more resources for the family and national investment.

More children in West Bengal receive private tutoring one child policy in india than any other state in the country (Pratham, 2005). Unfortunately the sample sizes in our data set are too small to do any state level analysis on West Bengal and Assam to complement the all-India picture in this paper. We did however do an analysis of the samples from West Bengal, Assam and the northeast together and the results were similar to the all-India results; hence, in the interests of parsimony, we present only the national findings here. Reading the popular as well as intellectual discourse on the growing economic disparities in the country, one is tempted to focus on the second explanation above. That is, one is tempted to think of these one child families as a movement towards greater population heterogeneity.

Hence, for women in their 30s, this compositional effect would vanish and the fact that the proportion of women aged 30–34 with just one living child has increased from 6% to 9% (with similar change observed for other ages) is indicative of a rising trend towards one child families that is deliberate. Among couples with secondary education or above for both partners, the proportion of 45–49 year old women with a single child rose from 3.5% to 6.7% between 1998–9 and 2005–6 (Pradhan and Sekhar 2014), precisely the group that is seen in the vanguard of fertility change. This observation has important implications for fertility theories that have assumed a floor of two child families for the first demographic transition. The life style of the one-child families that we document is an extension of the life style of two child families.

Migration and human capital accumulation in

In a recent paper, Basu and Desai (2016) demonstrate that there is in fact an interesting sub-section of the Indian population that seems to have stopped childbearing after one child. Furthermore, they have done so without any encouragement or pressure from government policy and in spite of being surrounded by people who want and celebrate two or more births – and even sometimes four or more births. Among the urban, upper income, educated middle class, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl.

Decline without restricting families

On World Population Day on July 11, India proposed a series of fresh population control measures reminiscent of China's two-child policy. "Smaller numbers of people will enter the reproductive - and main working - ages, and this will be socially, politically and economically disastrous. This is a demographic process and it is extremely difficult to reverse," says Mr Dyson. Moreover, we do not have any evidence to suggest significant levels of secondary or acquired sterility in India. Childlessness levels are certainly well within the range expected for societies in which STIs or RTIs have not had a major impact on primary sterility and where virtually all childless ness is involuntary (see Pathak and Unisa, 1993).

Although the population has been a problem acknowledged by the government, it has been growing continuously, non-stop. Not only will the policy help control head counts, but it will also provide any advantages socially and economically. According to the ministry of health and family welfare, India’s rate of total population growth has declined from 21.5% during the 1991 to 2001 period, to 17.6% during the 2001 to 2011 period. The Indian government does not have any plans to implement a two-child policy since it is a signatory to the International Conference on population and Development declaration. Signed in 1994, the declaration advocates free speech and honors the reproductive rights of couples to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children. Most drastically, Uttar Pradesh's draft bill on population management states that couples with two children who opt for voluntary sterilization would get incentives.

Unless we understand the forces that propel a nation from the first into the second demographic transition, it is difficult to foresee what might lie in the future for middle income countries whose Total Fertility Rate lies between 2 and 3. In China, the one-child policy has been successfully implemented and it has helped lower population growth. According to United Nations, after the Chinese government introduced the one-child policy, the fertility rate dropped. It dropped from around 4.6 births per woman in 1979 to 1.5 births per woman in 2010. The rate seems very low, but the data was stretched by the low rate in South India. The fact is that in North India, the fertility rate is way over 5 births per woman, which is as high as the mean the African countries with the highest fertility (Roser).

ii. Heavy investments in children

Doing his, we add to the emerging literature that challenges or modifies a universal theory of the second demographic transition for other parts of the world. For example, the emergence of extremely low fertility in Italy and Spain – some of the most conservative nations of Europe -- has proven to be somewhat of an impediment for theories that rely on a shift to post-modern values to explain low fertility (Chesnais 1996; Kertzer et al. 2009). Similarly, research on low fertility in Eastern and Central Europe suggests that there can be a diversity in routes to lowest low fertility (Sobotka 2008). 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. Our data do not allow us to check in any direct way that the one child family represents the Indian counterpart of such changed values in the very low fertility (and even the childless) family in contemporary Western Europe but several lines of, sometimes qualitative, enquiry suggest that this is not an implausible comparison.

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. The final argument emphasizes fertility limitation as a strategy for upwardly mobile families (Kasarda, Billy, and West 1986). Arguably its best-known formulation was presented by Greenhalgh (1988) in the Chinese context where she argued that the opening up of mobility opportunities increased the desire to invest in children and thus reduced fertility. 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. If we find that a small but significant proportion of the Indian population has always had a tendency to very low fertility, then our observation is not a sign of future trends in this family type but instead evidence of greater population heterogeneity than is expected for developing countries.

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. 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). In spite of record levels of economic growth in the first decade of this century, the female labor force participation rate has stagnated (National Sample Survey Office 2013).

Investing in the child’s education

Furthermore, this expansion of aspirations can be related to the nature of the rapid economic growth in the country. This growth has opened up the possibility of very high returns on education, but only for a few. That is, as employment opportunities have not kept pace with educational growth competition for scarce jobs increases.

With reference to China’s one child policy, the plan of birth control could reduce unemployment. The fall in birth rate offers a demographic dividend, as the economically productive proportion of the population grows more rapidly than the general population. Without the rapid decrease in fertility, China’s economy would not have grown by 7-8% in a year (Potts). With the decrease in population, competition among citizens was lowered and unemployment was alleviated (Potts). These one-child families in India may represent what Livi Bacci (1986) called the “forerunners” of fertility decline in the rest of the population, which implies that this an idea that will catch on. 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.

How one-child families are transforming India

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. 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. A study by Cameron and colleagues explored this phenomenon, finding that the one-child policy had behavioral impacts on only children.