The Decline In India’s Birth Rate – Analysis

June 27, 2026 
 Anbound
By Zhao Zhijiang

Key Takeaways

India’s Fertility Rate Drops Below Replacement – India’s TFR has fallen to 1.9, with births down ~20% from peak and the child population projected to shrink sharply by 2051.

Widespread Decline Hits Schools First – The trend affects most states (some at 1.3), already causing thousands of school closures and enrollment drops.

Risk of “Getting Old Before Getting Rich” – Driven by education, smartphones, and high child costs, India must urgently upgrade education and jobs or lose its demographic dividend.

Analysis

As the world’s most populous nation, India is undergoing a structural shift that is noteworthy, where there is a significantly accelerating decline in fertility. Latest statistics reveal that India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.9, falling below the replacement level of 2.1 required to maintain long-term population stability. For India, long perceived as a “young country” with a “demographic dividend”, this shift marks a crucial moment. It serves as a reminder to the outside world that India’s development can no longer be viewed through the outdated lens of “Indians prefer large families”. Instead, there is a critical need to re-evaluate the new challenges brought about by its population growth momentum, labor force structure, and intergenerational replacement processes.

This of course does not imply that India will immediately enter a phase of population contraction. Its total population will continue to grow from the current 1.45 billion, as it takes a considerable amount of time for a reduction in births to translate into a decline in total population. However, India’s annual number of births has already fallen by approximately one-fifth from its peak in 2001. The International Institute for Migration and Development (IIMAD), a well-known Indian institution, recently completed population projections for India from 2021 to 2051. The results show that the number of children aged 0 to 14 in India stood at 341 million in 2021. By 2031, this figure is projected to decline to 322 million. This means that during the decade from 2021 to 2031, the number of children aged 0 to 14 will decrease by 19 million. Between 2031 and 2041, the child population will shrink by another 34 million, followed by a further reduction of 22 million between 2041 and 2051.


More notably, this demographic shift is not confined to a few affluent cities but has emerged as a pervasive trend across multiple states. The total fertility rate in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal is approximately 1.3, on par with Finland. Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, stands at around 1.4, close to the level of Norway. The appearance of a “Nordic-style” demographic profile in India was entirely unimaginable in the past.

This shift has already shown visible consequences at the local level. The tangible impacts of India’s demographic transition are reflected in realities ranging from the closure of 1,200 schools in Tamil Nadu last year due to insufficient student enrollment, to a sharp drop in first-grade enrollment in Kerala, a massive wave of school consolidations in Karnataka, and a nationwide reduction of approximately 20,000 public schools over five years (between the 2019-20 and 2024-25 academic years). A declining child population first impacts schools, subsequently rippling into child-related consumption, local employment, housing demand, and future labor supply. The shocks of demographic change never unfold uniformly, as they tend to manifest first in localized sectors before gradually spreading into nationwide structural issues.


Researchers at ANBOUND believe that the decline in India’s birth rate is a major case of “cognitive reversal” in global demographic logic. In the past, it was generally assumed that developed countries had low fertility rates while developing countries had high fertility rates. Under such logic, affluent groups have fewer children, whereas impoverished groups have more. This conventional wisdom once possessed strong explanatory power, but it is now failing. Both statistical data and empirical field surveys clearly indicate that low fertility is no longer a unique characteristic of developed economies like Europe, Japan, and South Korea, but is rapidly spreading to middle-income and certain lower-income countries. Brazil, Iran, Thailand, and Turkey have remained below replacement level for years. Sri Lanka’s total fertility rate is approximately 1.3, Tunisia’s is around 1.6, and Morocco’s has also fallen below the replacement threshold. Even in regions characterized by high marriage rates and low female formal employment rates, birth rates are declining. This demonstrates that the impact of modernization on reproductive behavior has transcended traditional income levels and cultural differences.

A closer inspection of the drivers behind India’s rapid fertility decline reveals three primary factors.

The first is the universalization of female education, which constitutes the most critical long-term factor driving down fertility rates. Demographic research shows that increases in female educational attainment typically lead to a significant reduction in fertility desires and actual births because it alters women’s timing of marriage and childbearing, intra-household status, life choices, and labor force participation opportunities. Since the 1990s, India has vigorously promoted enrollment policies for girls, leading to a continuous rise in net enrollment rates for girls at both primary and secondary school levels. This change exhibits a clear chronological correspondence with the subsequent acceleration of fertility decline. In contrast to India, birth rates remain high to this day in regions such as Niger, Chad, and northern Nigeria, where formal education coverage for girls remains very low. India’s experience demonstrates that once education penetrates broader households, the preferences for fewer children, delayed childbearing, and high-quality parenting gradually replace traditional mindsets of “more children bring more blessings”, becoming the mainstream reproductive choice in society.


The second factor is the widespread penetration of smartphones and media dissemination. Although this variable occasionally sparks debate, it is equally impossible to ignore. Smartphones may influence fertility rates by altering social patterns, reducing face-to-face interactions, increasing leisure time, and expanding access to information regarding contraception, marriage, and childbearing. Some studies have identified a correlation between smartphone penetration and declining adolescent birth rates. In India, earlier research pointed out that when cable television first entered villages, it was associated with a decline in fertility rates because the portrayal of urban middle-class families in television series reshaped rural residents’ imaginations regarding family size and female roles. Today, the reach and influence of smartphones far exceed that of television, bringing urban lifestyles, consumption standards, educational anxiety, and middle-class family models into a broader spectrum of rural and low-income populations. This does not necessarily lead directly to having fewer children, but it reinforces people’s perceptions of modern life, causing lifestyles characterized by nuclear families, fewer children, and high investment to become social norms at a faster pace.

More practical and fundamental pressures stem from the third factor, namely the economic dimension. The decision made by Indian families is not a simple matter of “not wanting to have children” but rather a recalculation of child-rearing costs amidst intensifying social competition. With the advancement of urbanization, rising housing costs, escalating educational competition, and growing healthcare expenditures, children are no longer viewed merely as a source of household labor or the continuation of lineage in the traditional sense. Instead, they have become a long-term, high-cost, and high-investment project. The higher parents’ expectations are for their children’s education and upward social mobility, the more they tend to reduce the number of children to concentrate resources on fewer offspring. This logic is highly pronounced in India. In 2025, approximately 39% of Indian children attended fee-charging private schools, up from 32% in 2015, indicating that an increasing number of families have been drawn into an educational arms race. Deficiencies in the quality of public education have further intensified the financial pressure on families to fund private schooling. When a household observes neighbors having fewer children and investing more money into their upbringing, they are compelled to adopt similar strategies to prevent their own children from falling behind in the competition.

It must be pointed out that a distinct characteristic facing India is that it will confront the pressure of “getting old before getting rich”. India’s economy is growing rapidly, infrastructure development is accelerating, and high hopes are pinned on its manufacturing sector and digital economy. The country indeed retains substantial room for growth and may well become a wealthier and globally more influential nation over the next two decades. However, demographic structural changes remind external observers that India’s window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely. The key to the so-called demographic dividend lies not merely in a large population size, but in a high proportion of young labor, robust employment absorption capacity, improvements in educational quality, and industrial upgrading capable of accommodating labor transfers. If the birth rate continues to decline while employment quality, the educational system, social security, and public health systems fail to improve in tandem, India will bear the burden of an aging population prematurely, before fully transitioning into a high-income society.


To the world, the continuous decline in India’s birth rate means that the international community’s traditional imagination of India’s future path needs to be adjusted accordingly. India is no longer simply a country experiencing continuous population expansion, nor is it a place that will forever supply an infinite amount of cheap labor. Although it still possesses the potential to rise, this rise will be accompanied by demographic constraints far more complex than in the past. For global capital and multinational corporations, merely viewing India as the next market to enjoy a long-term demographic dividend risks underestimating the structural changes unfolding within it. The India of the future will become wealthier, but it may also simultaneously become older. It will possess a larger consumer market, yet face higher household child-rearing costs. At the same time, it will project stronger national ambitions, while simultaneously being forced to manage comprehensive challenges woven from interlocking pressures in education, employment, religion, regional disparities, and social security.

Final analysis conclusion:

The obvious decline in India’s birth rate signifies that the global trend of low fertility has penetrated deeply into major developing nations. Advancements in female education, rising child-rearing costs, intensifying educational competition, the diffusion of urban lifestyles, and the spread of smartphones have collectively driven Indian families toward a transition marked by fewer births and high-investment parenting. India retains the potential to rise, but its future challenges are no longer a matter of pure population quantity. Instead, they center on the phenomenon of “getting old before getting rich” and whether it can effectively translate a finite demographic dividend into comprehensive capabilities across education, employment, industry, and social security.

Zhijiang Zhao is a Research Fellow for Geopolitical Strategy programme at ANBOUND, an independent think tank.


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