There is a strange new symmetry between Asia’s two billion-strong neighbours, and it is written across the lives of their women. In Beijing, the State is pleading with couples to have children–dangling cash, tax breaks, longer maternity leave, subsidised fertility treatment, and getting nowhere. In Amaravati and Chennai, chief ministers are urging families to have more babies and writing cheques for third and fourth children. Both countries spent the better part of half a century forcing women’s fertility in precisely the opposite direction. The policies have reversed. The instinct beneath them has not. In neither capital does anyone seem to think the woman herself is a person worth consulting.
Begin with China, because China is the future India keeps insisting it will avoid. For three-and-a-half decades the one-child policy treated the womb as a problem of state to be solved with fines, surveillance and force. It worked, and then it kept working long after Beijing wanted it to stop. The one-child rule gave way to a two-child rule in 2015 and a three-child rule in 2021, and the birth rate fell through every floor regardless. Last year it hit the lowest level in the history of the People’s Republic: Fewer than eight million babies, against 9.5 million the year before, in a population that has now shrunk for four years running and is greying fast. The government has responded with the full pronatalist toolkit – baby bonuses, tax relief, maternity leave stretched to 158 days, insurance cover for IVF, in some places even rules about pain relief in childbirth. None of it has moved the needle.
The reason is the part the policymakers least want to hear. Chinese women are not declining to have children because they have forgotten how, or because the subsidy was too small. They are declining because education, income and a measure of independence have given them the standing to decide, and many are deciding that marriage and motherhood, on the terms their society still offers, cost more than they are willing to pay. The same state that once conscripted women into having fewer children now finds it cannot conscript them into having more. Autonomy, it turns out, does not run in reverse on government instruction.
Now look at India, which this year quietly crossed the line China crossed years ago. The national fertility rate has fallen below replacement for the first time, to 1.9 children per woman. The number conceals a chasm. Delhi sits at 1.2, Tamil Nadu and Kerala at 1.3 – figures indistinguishable from East Asia’s, in the very states that invested earliest and hardest in women’s health and schooling. These are not failures of development. They are its signature. Educated women in secure households having fewer children is what success looked like everywhere it has ever happened.
Andhra Pradesh now pays families ₹30,000 for a third child and ₹40,000 for a fourth. Goa, Karnataka and Telangana have opened public IVF centres. Southern chief ministers have begun, in so many words, to ask women to reproduce for the nation, and here India has added a twist all its own. The plea is tied to power. When parliamentary seats are redrawn by population, the states that succeeded at family planning stand to be punished with fewer seats, their weight in the Lok Sabha shrinking as the populous north grows.
This is the deep continuity that ought to disturb us. Across two opposite political systems and two opposite demographic moments, the woman appears in exactly the same role: As an instrument of demographic strategy, first to be curbed, now to be commandeered. Her own wishes are the one variable the planners never model.
China is the standing rebuke to where that logic leads. You cannot spend 50 years teaching women that their fertility is a public utility, finally grant them the education and income that let them choose, and then be surprised when they choose for themselves. No bonus large enough has been found anywhere in East Asia to buy back the births that an autonomous woman declines to supply.
There is another way to read the falling birth rate, and it is the honest one. It is the sound of Indian women, at last, with something closer to a real say over their own bodies and futures. A government that respects that would stop treating the number of babies as a target to be hit and start preparing for the country it is actually becoming: an aging one, which by 2050 will have one person in five over sixty. That means building care infrastructure, pensions and health systems for the old, and the children that people do freely choose to have.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Kritee Chopra Sharma, research associate, Centre for East Asian Studies, Christ University and research advisor, Ambitio.
