What one-child policy? As India's population growth slows, China-style controls on births called into question

For the first time in decades, India's population growth looks to be slowing - an achievement that advocates of its "voluntary" approach to family planning say shows more coercive methods, such as those used by China, are not needed.

Data from the Health Ministry's most recent National Family Health Survey, released last week, showed India's total fertility rate had dropped to 2.0, below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. In urban areas it was even lower, with an average of 1.6 children per woman.

The demographic milestone indicates India's 1.3 billion population is nearing its peak, and stands in stark contrast to the 1950s when women in the country had an average of six children each. India's total fertility rate in 2015-16, when the last survey was done, stood at 2.2.

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Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, celebrated the survey results as proof of the power of persuasion over more direct interventions such as China's notorious one-child policy.

"It shows you don't need to use force or draconian measures," she said. "You can do it voluntarily. People will willingly do whatever makes sense to them but you need to respect them."

A confluence of factors from the government to village level came together to bring about the change, but one of the most important has been improvements to education, according to Muttreja.

"Educating girls is the most effective contraceptive," she said, pointing to data showing that Indian women with 12 years of schooling have no more than two children, while those with no education have an average of three, according to the latest survey results.

Actual contraceptives have helped as well, with 67 per cent of survey respondents saying they now use them compared to 54 per cent in 2015-16. Meanwhile, the proportion of people with unmet family planning needs has declined from 13 per cent to 9 per cent over the same period, the survey showed.

The government can take credit for much of this new-found availability of contraceptives, with its family-planning efforts focused since 2016 on the 146 districts across five Indian states with the highest fertility rates. Fertility rates are not uniform across India, with the survey showing that women in the eastern state of Bihar, for instance, have an average of three children each.

In addition to education and contraceptive use, better prenatal care and maternal health, more hospital births and higher vaccination rates against common childhood diseases have been credited with bringing down India's total fertility rate - as has Indian women's increased empowerment and the fact that more now marry at a later age.

India is still on course to overtake China as the world's most populous country, an event that had been expected to occur "somewhere between 2024-2028, but now it will be delayed", according to Professor K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.

In contrast to China's ageing society, India's population skews younger - with about 30 per cent of people in the country aged 10-24. It should also be noted that the family health survey is based on a representative sample of 650,000 households, making it difficult to extrapolate the results to society at large.

But population watchers agree the survey results show that India's much talked about "demographic dividend" will not last forever, with perhaps only another two decades or so left for the country to cash-in.

"It will only be a dividend if we give good health care, education, and skills to the millions of young Indians, otherwise they will neither be productive nor able" said the Population Foundation of India's Muttreja. "As the number of old people grows, to support [those who are] ageing, we have to invest in [young people] heavily."

Nutrition is also vital, said Reddy of the Public Health Foundation of India, citing the troubling rates of anaemia among young people that the survey revealed - an indicator of both poor nutrition and poor health. "The survey reveals that 67 per cent of children under five and 59 per cent of girls aged 15-19 were anaemic. This must be addressed," he said.

Meanwhile, critics of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi say the survey's findings expose a population myth the party has long propagated: that Muslims have larger families than Hindus. On the contrary, fertility rates declined across all sections of society, according to the survey.

In July, India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, under staunch Modi ally Yogi Adityanath, decreed that couples who have a third child will no longer be allowed to apply for government jobs - a measure critics said was aimed at Muslims. Other BJP-ruled states are thinking of following suit.

"The only purpose of the population propaganda was to make Hindus feel insecure about Muslims so as to win their votes," said the head of a family planning NGO who asked not to be named. "But now the survey has taken the wind out of the BJP's sails and exposed it as being very wide off the mark."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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