The shrinking size of families in India contributed to India\u2019s economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s, a United Nations report has found.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s family size has steadily declined and continues to from 5.2 children per family in 1971 to 2.3 in 2016, which means the family size itself has fallen from 7.2 to 4.3.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t just India; shrinking family sizes contributed to Asia\u2019s economic miracle in the 1980s and 1990s, including in China, according to the State of the World Population Report 2018 by the United Nations Population Fund .<\/p>\n
Still, India deserves special mention because it has, along with Bangladesh, El Salvador, Nepal, Myanmar and Nicaragua, fertility rates that are near replacement level, despite having lower per capita incomes than other countries with replacement-level fertility .<\/p>\n
India\u2019s population has doubled since 1971, from 566 million to 1.35 billion in 2016. The total fertility rate in urban India has already fallen below replacement levels of 2.1.<\/p>\n
But wide disparities remain between states and within districts within states. \u201cAlthough average total fertility for the whole country is 2.3 births per woman, it is above 3 in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, and below replacement level in Maharashtra and West Bengal, and the four southernmost states,\u201d said the report.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s common across regions, however, is that women across all sections of society, irrespective of wealth, education and urban or rural areas, are having fewer children than ever before.<\/p>\n
\u201cThough some groups are ahead of the others, families have become smaller across all sections of society,\u201d said Shailaja Chandra, former executive director, Jansankhya Sthirata Kosh.<\/p>\n
Like in Bangladesh and Indonesia in the 1970s and 1980s, fertility declined in India even in poor, rural areas when more women gained access to modern methods of contraception under government-run campaigns and improved availability of contraceptives services, including methods to space children.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat India got right was increasing institutional deliveries and providing reversible contraceptive services at the health centre after counselling to women after they had delivered their baby, so a woman could choose when and how many children she wanted to have,\u201d said Chandra.<\/p>\n
Providing the basket of contraceptive choices to include modern contraceptives such as intra-uterine devices, injectables and contraceptive pills, drove women\u2019s sexual and economic emancipation in India, much like the contraceptive pill did in the developed countries in the \u201960s.<\/p>\n
Gaps remain. \u201cThe desired fertility rate of 1.8 in India is lower than the fertility rate of 2.3, which means many women are still having more children than they want. There is still an unmet need for quality contraception, which must be met as fertility is not just a population issue but also a women\u2019s rights and health issue,\u201d said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The shrinking size of families in India contributed to India\u2019s economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s, a United Nations report has found. India\u2019s family size has steadily declined and continues to from 5.2 children per family in 1971 to 2.3 in 2016, which means the family size itself has fallen from 7.2 to 4.3. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44610,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44611,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44609\/revisions\/44611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}