The talk about inhabitants in India should give attention to girls’s reproductive autonomy reasonably than impose management over their our bodies via statistics and demographic narratives and nervousness. That’s what India’s newest information on fertility urgently alerts.

For the primary time, India’s fertility charge has fallen to 1.9, under the alternative stage of two.1 essential for a inhabitants to switch itself from one era to the following. The Pattern Registration System Survey’s Statistical Report 2023 reveals that fertility has declined even in rural areas.

This challenges the widespread narrative that India is overpopulated. These figures point out that the nation is transferring in direction of inhabitants stabilisation, with some projections suggesting that it could decline from as early because the 2060s, or nearer to 2080.

The falling fertility charge has generated a brand new nervousness. The discourse has shifted from considerations about “too many individuals” to alarms about “too few births” to maintain the economic system, workforce – and political energy for some teams.

Politicians and spiritual figures at the moment are urging {couples} to have extra kids, typically invoking cultural or patriotic motives and even explicitly linking it to political illustration.

Within the midst of those debates, girls proceed to be handled as devices to serve demographic objectives reasonably than as people who’ve private freedom.

Fertility as a political mission

From colonial inhabitants anxieties to post-Independence inhabitants management programmes, the Indian state has repeatedly sought to manipulate girls within the identify of growth.

In the course of the Emergency from 1975 to 1977, pressured male sterilisation campaigns eroded public belief in household planning. Nevertheless, within the following a long time, the burden of inhabitants management shifted nearly fully onto girls.

Mass sterilisation camps turned the dominant type of contraception, usually with out knowledgeable consent.

By the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, a number of states launched insurance policies to discourage having greater than two kids. For instance, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana barred candidates with greater than two kids from contesting native physique elections to village panchayats and municipal companies.

Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh linked eligibility for welfare advantages with adherence to household dimension restrictions. Insurance policies like these disproportionately harmed poor, marginalised and rural communities, for whom bigger households are sometimes formed by livelihood insecurity, youngster mortality and the absence of social safety.

Even after India’s household planning programme was declared to be “target-free”, with no mounted numbers to attain, sterilisation continued to dominate household planning statistics. Tragedies are inevitable when girls are herded to be sterilised in meeting line procedures.

For example, the deaths of 15 poor and marginalised girls in Chhattisgarh in 2014 after botched sterilisation procedures uncovered how a numbers-driven system devalues girls’s lives, dignity and rights.

Layered onto this historical past is a persistent nervousness concerning the fertility of the Muslim group. Regardless of a gradual decline in Muslim fertility that’s according to nationwide tendencies, Hindutva narratives painting Muslims as a demographic risk who will outnumber Hindus, ignoring the social and financial circumstances that form reproductive selections.

With India’s fertility charge at alternative ranges, the pendulum has swung once more. The demographic creativeness that when demanded fewer births now calls for extra. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat has, most lately in August, urged Hindus to have extra kids in nationwide curiosity. The logic of management is identical, solely the specified final result has modified.

Governance of copy

Reproductive decision-making, notably for girls, is never a person or autonomous alternative. It’s formed by household and girls’s disproportionate duty for gendered labour, equivalent to unpaid home work and caregiving for relations, that’s usually undervalued, and constrains girls’s negotiating energy inside households. These on a regular basis labour expectations intersect with the hierarchies of caste and faith, additional limiting girls’s capability to make their reproductive selections.

Structural circumstances equivalent to youngster mortality, precarious livelihoods, unequal entry to healthcare and training, and gender-based violence additionally affect reproductive behaviour.

Though the state units demographic objectives, girls’s reproductive selections are not often formed by their aspirations alone. They’re continuously negotiated between what they need, what is anticipated of them and what’s potential inside the patriarchal norms of their households, social establishments and market forces.

Girls could also be inspired to bear kids to fulfil familial obligations or, pressured to restrict births within the identify of duty or growth, blurring the road between alternative and coercion.

Reproductive governance operates via a number of mechanisms: incentives equivalent to money funds for sterilisation, disincentives equivalent to being denied welfare advantages or political participation, and ethical persuasion via beliefs of accountable citizenship and motherhood.

These mechanisms disproportionately regulate girls’s reproductive lives and function erratically throughout traces of gender, caste, class, and faith. More and more, market forces are additionally taking part in a job via the commercialisation of fertility companies and assisted reproductive applied sciences (ART).

Collectively, the state, household, group and market handle copy in ways in which constrain autonomy reasonably than allow free alternative.

Fertility and electoral politics

This governance of fertility now extends into the realm of electoral politics. In 2026, India’s parliamentary constituencies will likely be up for reorganisation based mostly on the newest inhabitants information after the census.

Southern states, the place fertility has been under alternative ranges for years now, concern a lack of political illustration in favour of the extra populous northern states. Political leaders at the moment are urging households to have extra kids to safeguard political illustration.

In March, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin inspired households to have extra kids. Equally, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has linked welfare advantages to household dimension, saying that bigger households might obtain larger incentives to assist handle the “demographic dividend”. Fertility is thus framed as a way to guard political illustration or financial pursuits reasonably than a matter of particular person autonomy.

Political, financial and social anxieties converge on girls, erasing their personhood and lowering them to bearers of the nation’s demographic future. Fertility stays a lever of governance, an act of citizenship and loyalty, not a private choice.

Reproductive justice

India’s fertility debate should shift from inhabitants targets to a framework of reproductive justice, affirming the appropriate of each particular person to determine if, when, what number of and underneath what circumstances, to have kids, free from coercion, incentives or ethical strain.

The precise to make reproductive selections is protected underneath Article 21 of the Indian Structure, which ensures dignity, privateness, and bodily integrity. Landmark Supreme Courtroom judgements, such because the 2009 ruling that handled the being pregnant of a girl with psychological incapacity and the KS Puttuswamy vs Union of India verdict in 2017 on privateness, have affirmed that reproductive selections are central to private liberty.

A rights-based strategy should transcend controlling numbers. It should guarantee entry to a full vary of contraception and protected abortion companies with out coercion, whereas additionally addressing caste discrimination, lack of training and employment and gender-based violence that constrain actual alternative. With out tackling these systemic obstacles, “alternative” stays an empty abstraction.

India wants a social and political surroundings that affirms reproductive autonomy and the appropriate to stay with dignity – no matter reproductive selections girls make.

[Sarojini Nadimpally, a public health practitioner and researcher, works on issues related to gender, fertility and reproductive & genetic technologies. Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.]