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After decades of grappling with population explosion, India now confronts the opposite
The sheer speed of the reversal has taken Indian politics by surprise.
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According to projections from India’s official economic survey, Andhra Pradesh’s population will stay at its 2016 level of just over 50 million for the next decades.
PHOTO: AFP
Mihir Sharma
In March, veteran technocrat Chandrababu Naidu – chief minister of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh – told the state legislature that his government would pay women to have additional children. He and his counterparts in other southern states are desperate to escape the sheer weight of numbers in the country’s north.
Chief Minister Naidu promised women 25,000 rupees ($340) if they had a third child, and also suggested extended maternity leave and a longer period of free education. But in India, as elsewhere in the world, such policies are likely to fail; when given a choice, women have children on their own schedules, and not those set by politicians.
