How one-child families are transforming India

Kerala reached the milestone in 1988, Tamil Nadu in 1993, and the rest by the mid-2000s. And because the establishment of an independent household is culturally not a requirement for marriage and childbearing to occur. At the same time, it is true that we cannot assume that this will always be the case. 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.

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That same year, 206 children were adopted to the United States, according to the U.S. State Department.191 Since then, the demand for healthy infant girls increased and transnational adoption increased rapidly. In accordance with this high demand, China began defining more restrictions on foreign adoption, including limitations on applicant's age, marital status, mental and physical health, income, family size, and education.191 According to the U.S. State Department, there have been over 80,000 international adoptions from China since international adoptions were implemented. On 31 May 2021, China's government relaxed restrictions even more, allowing women up to three children.136137138139 This change was brought about mainly due to the declining birth rate and population growth. Although the Chinese government was trying to spark new growth in the population, some experts did not think it would be enough.140 Many called for the government to remove the limit altogether, though most women and couples already had adopted the idea that one child is enough and to have more is not in their best interest.

Effects of the OCP on fertility and

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. 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. That is, in many contexts, the same forces that explain one child policy in india and predict the first demographic transition might be at play in further fertility declines that result in the prominence of a below replacement fertility.

Motivation for a One-Child Family

While the government has encouraged “high quality” urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children. The one-child policy, officially implemented in China in 1979 until recently, and the unofficial gender-infanticide practices in India, first recorded in 1789 will be examined for their demographic impact and the paper will also discuss whether modern population control practices have decreased infanticide practices. Finally, the present intends to draw attention to an issue that has recently only marginally been hinted at, as it often echoes parochial understandings of the world, and that is whether practiced gendercide and strict population control policies can be distinct from the overall treatment of children, especially female.

aspect of economic life

India is currently expected to overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2027, per a 2019 UN report. UNICEF estimates that around 25 million children are born every year in India, accounting for a fifth of the world's annual births. A fertility rate of 1.8 births per woman leads to a slow, manageable population decline.

Urban, middle-class couples face mounting financial pressure, including the cost of raising children and of caring for the elderly. While the government has encouraged "high quality" urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children. The projected unemployment will increase from 17.7 million in 2016 to 17.8 million in 2017, and it will continue to increase till 18 million in 2018 (United Nations).

The authors tested Beijing youths born in several birth cohorts just before and just after the launch of the one-child policy using economic games designed to detect differences in desirable social behaviors like trust and altruism. India’s fertility rate has dropped to 2.3 births per woman in 2016, compared to 3.2 births per woman in 2000, according to government data. But the booming population has been raising concerns for decades due to a rising poverty, decline in jobs and a poor literacy rate. On May 31, China announced a landmark policy shift to allow couples to have three children in an attempt at raising its flagging birth rate. The change comes five years after the country's 2016 decision to scrap its one-child policy and raise the quota to two-kids-per-family. While the country has not yet adopted China's now-overturned policy of fining couples for having more than two children, these statewide proposals are an attempt to control its fast-increasing population numbers.

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. We examine this expectation below and conclude that in fact there might be very different forces at work here. Many of the tactics used by the government were reflected in the day-to-day life of the average Chinese citizen. Since the Chinese government could not outright force its inhabitants to follow strict policy orders, the government developed strategies to encourage and promote individuals to take on this responsibility themselves. The Family Planning Commission spread propaganda by placing pictures and images on everyday items.108 Aside from signs and posters on billboards, advertisements were placed on postage stamps, milk cartons, food products and many other household items to promote the benefits of having one child.

In the landmark case of Suchita Srivastava & Anr vs Chandigarh Administration (2009), the Supreme Court bench found that a woman making reproductive decisions is an essential element of the right to personal liberty secured by Article 21 of the Indian constitution. India remains determined to its responsibilities under global law, including the regulations included in the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action of 1994. Here are some proposed provisions in the two-child policy bill adopted by the state of Assam and Uttar Pradesh. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. As early as March 2022, reports circulated on Chinese social media that India's population had already surpassed China's, though this was later dispelled by experts. 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.

• A consumption index based on these goods has been created by adding up 23 assets and amenities (for a further description, see Desai et al, 2010).
• It dropped from around 4.6 births per woman in 1979 to 1.5 births per woman in 2010.
• In a society in which intergenerational expectations continue to be bidirectional, rearing such a child also means a marked rise in parental status and fortunes and, to that extent, the one child family is certainly an indicator of sharply rising social and economic aspirations.
• While the government has encouraged "high quality" urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children.

Are grandparents happier? Family ties and depression in later life

But these states fear that India's shifting demographics with varying population shares between states, will significantly impact electoral representation and state wise-allocation of parliamentary seats and federal revenues. Leaders of two southern states – Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – have recently advocated more children. 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.

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. 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). However, if the path to below replacement fertility could be shown to also be paved by familiar economic forces rather than cultural shifts, perhaps we may see India experiencing below replacement fertility in the near rather than distant future. In this paper, we attempt such a reevaluation by looking at the emergence of a subgroup of the Indian population that seems to exhibit very low fertility.

• Note that less than 2% of the IHDS families indicated that their annual income is less than the money invested in farming.
• As we look at these ongoing parallel transitions – the first demographic transition in developing countries, and what is often called the the second demographic transition in industrialized countries – it is important to think about the relationship between the two.
• Sarma earlier hinted on June 18 that he would introduce plans to make having two children the norm, by withholding subsidies and other benefits to those who choose to have more than two kids.
• The Family Planning Commission spread propaganda by placing pictures and images on everyday items.108 Aside from signs and posters on billboards, advertisements were placed on postage stamps, milk cartons, food products and many other household items to promote the benefits of having one child.
• 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.

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Population control can help reduce carbon emission in India and help alleviate climate change. Carbon emission means the carbon dioxide emission due to certain human activities. According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research created by the European Commission and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in 2015, India ranks number 4 in the world in carbon emission, with up to 2.5 million carbon dioxide (kt) emission in 2015 (see Fig. 2). China is an example of avoiding excess carbon emission with the population control policy. From the one-child policy, China avoided around 300 million births, meaning she has averted 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005 based on average world per capita emissions of 4.2 tonnes (Doyle).

Top state leaders believed that a bigger population would effectively contribute to the national projects. The Minister also ruled out that there is a higher growth in Muslim population in the country as is being projected by a section of BJP and RSS and also denied any large scale conversions. But the notion that India should emulate China's past population policies is misguided at best, and dangerous at worst. The idea the country should adopt something like China's former "one-child policy" has been moving from the fringe to the political mainstream.