Resolving India’s population woes requires political maturity

Population growth in India is on a downward trajectory. Economist Shamika Ravi, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recently commented on X that fertility rates in more than three-quarters of India’s states are now below what is required to maintain population levels.
For the world’s most populous country, with a population over 1.45 billion, this should be an occasion for celebration, especially given its overburdened infrastructure and scarcity of resources.
But many of the country’s leaders don’t seem pleased with this state of affairs.
Chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, two progressive and relatively prosperous states in the south of the country, have been calling on their constituents to have more children. The central government, led by Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, appears hellbent on parliamentary reforms that would reduce the representation of states that managed to curtail their population growth while awarding states that continue to grow with more seats.
If all this appears illogical, it’s worth remembering that what makes short-term sense politically often does not make sense in any other way.
So why are some Indian leaders not happy with the country’s apparent success in bringing population growth under control, and why are they actively trying to incentivise Indians to have more children?
For one, the decline in population growth is not uniform across the country. Some of India’s most populous and poorest states are still growing rapidly, increasing the strain on the richer states that are forced to subsidise them. Second, with a revamp of the Parliament of India that would give more seats to states with larger populations looming on the horizon, richer states that are less populous – and have been much more successful in implementing population control strategies – are worried about their future representative power at the centre. Third, the decline in the fertility rate means the country’s much-touted “demographic dividend” – strong economic growth due to a large proportion of the population being of working age – will peter out.
Government data shows that the three major Indian states still growing at high rates are Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and Jharkhand, all in the north. UP, which already has more people than Brazil, has a fertility rate of 2.4, while Bihar’s is at 3.0 and Jharkhand’s is 2.3 – all higher than the Indian average of 2.0 and above the replacement rate of 2.1. However, in rich southern states, which are home to some of India’s most prosperous and productive cities, like tech powerhouse Bangalore and car-making hub Chennai, fertility rates stand at 1.7-1.8, well below the current India average and the replacement rate.
In response to these numbers, Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister MK Stalin (named after the late Soviet dictator) and Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu have made calls that fly in the face of years of careful government-sponsored family planning schemes.
Andhra Pradesh has abolished a law disqualifying people with more than two children from contesting local body elections. Naidu has gone as far as to state that having larger families is a “responsibility” and a “service to society”.
Stalin, concerned about the south’s potential loss of parliamentary seats in the upcoming parliamentary reform exercise, went a step further and asked “Why shouldn’t we aim for 16 children?” While this was a reference to a Tamil language adage, hopefully not to be taken literally, it is likely the beginning of a campaign to put pressure on the central BJP government to abandon the planned parliamentary reforms.
The BJP wants to revamp the Parliament by a process called “delimitation”, which will assign seats to each state according to population figures from a new census that is to be conducted sometime in the next couple of years. The southern states are furious, arguing that the exercise will punish them for their good track record in keeping population growth in check.
There also appears to be a cynical side to this reform effort, as it will likely benefit Modi’s BJP politically.
Some calculations show that the north of the country, which is the stronghold of Modi’s right-wing party, will likely gain some 30 seats in Parliament, roughly the same amount the south will lose if the existing seats were to be redistributed according to the data that will be gathered in the upcoming census. If Parliament is expanded in line with the country’s population growth, the north will gain more than 150 seats and the south a mere 35.
So either way, it is in the BJP’s interests to try and push delimitation through. Even now, winning UP is usually enough to win the national election. If the state has even more seats, and the BJP holds onto its support base there, it could be in power for a very, very long time.
Gifting more seats to UP due to its growing population may seem smart for the BJP and even fair on paper, but it is, in fact, a bad idea that could further hurt an already polarised country. It would disincentivise states from controlling their populations and focusing on improving living conditions for their people, while giving rich, progressive states more reason to feel sidelined by the central government.
The BJP-led central government should follow the lead of earlier administrations – including one of its own – by kicking the delimitation can down the road and continuing to allow the population numbers from 1971 to be used as a basis for parliamentary seat calculations. This will allow the northern states time to catch up on population control.
Or, if it has to go ahead with delimitation based on population – the fundamental tenets of democracy link population numbers with power, after all – it needs to work out a formula to compensate the southern states, perhaps with additional seats based on their social progress.
The central government’s data shows that the southern states rank higher to much higher on its Social Progress Index (SPI) than the big northern ones. The SPI incorporates a range of indicators including nutrition, medical care, education and access to water and sanitation.
There is already an obvious, short-term solution to the diminishing demographic dividend problem: moving people from where they are in excess to where they are actually needed and can be catered for. This is already happening – migrants from Bihar are present in large numbers in Stalin’s Tamil Nadu, for instance.
Such a strategy would keep real wages down, and push locals of rich states into higher-paying jobs, while providing some relief to states that are struggling to provide a decent standard of living for their massive populations.
Of course, taking this high road would require a lot of political maturity.
Southern states should avoid political grandstanding, guard against a backlash against migrants whose culture and language may be alien to them and band together to formulate a bargaining strategy on delimitation.
In the same way, the BJP needs to demonstrate significant political maturity and put India’s long-term interests ahead of short-term gains for the party, and abandon or at least postpone delimitation for the benefit of the whole nation.
The best solutions are to be found in getting politicians to behave apolitically and look at the long-term future of the country, not their own immediate gains. This is a bit like asking an obese man to stick to the diet the doctor ordered when he can sniff the fragrance from a nearby feast; hard on him, but the consequences of making the wrong choice would be profound.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.