A costly policy error by China should be a cautionary tale for India

India is no longer facing the population problem that shaped its family-planning policy for decades. A new working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), 'The Ghost of Population Past', authored by Sanjeev Sanyal, Aakanksha Arora and Virat Singh, argues that fertility has fallen so far that population control should no longer be an objective of state policy.

The more useful comparison in the paper is with China, which spent decades restricting births and is now trying to reverse a demographic shift that has become deeply embedded. China's policy error offers India a warning about how difficult it can be to change course once low fertility becomes a social norm.

India has already crossed the demographic threshold

The most important number in the EAC-PM paper is India's total fertility rate of 1.9, below the replacement level of roughly 2.1. But the national figure hides a much sharper transition in large parts of the country.


Remove Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and India's TFR drops to 1.6. That is close to the level in the US and Northern Europe. The southern states have moved even further. Andhra Pradesh is at 1.4, Telangana and Karnataka at 1.5, Kerala and Tamil Nadu at 1.3. Maharashtra is at 1.4 and West Bengal at 1.3. Delhi, at 1.2, is lower still. Sikkim is at 1.0.

The EAC-PM points out that these states have been below replacement fertility for more than two decades. That is significant because this is no longer a temporary fluctuation in births. A prolonged period of below-replacement fertility changes the age structure of the population. The age numbers underline this point. The median age in these demographically mature states is almost 35 years, compared with about 30 years for India as a whole. The paper notes that their demographic profile is already closer to ageing economies such as the US, whose median age is around 39, than to India's national profile.

There is another number that captures the change particularly well. India recorded roughly 29.3 million births in 2001. By 2023 that had fallen to about 23.2 million. The decline is around 6.1 million births a year, which will roughly be 21% in just over two decades. The EAC-PM paper notes that India now has roughly the same annual number of births as it had in 1974, which is a remarkable reversal for a country whose population has more than doubled since then.

China shows why reversing the trend is harder

The one-child policy was introduced in China nationally in 1980 and remained the centrepiece of Chinese population policy for decades. The government eventually moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and a three-child policy in 2021. The policy direction had effectively turned around as China went from discouraging births to encouraging them. But fertility still did not rebound.

China's population has now begun to shrink. Births fell to about 7.92 million in 2025, while deaths reached 11.31 million. The population declined for the fourth consecutive year. The country's fertility rate is now around 1.0, roughly half the replacement level.

The scale of the Chinese reversal is important when thinking about India. China's population policy did not simply reduce the number of children born during the period when the restrictions were in force. It helped establish a smaller-family norm that proved difficult to undo after the policy itself changed.

That does not mean the one-child policy caused China's entire fertility decline. Fertility had already fallen substantially before 1980 as China urbanised and became more prosperous. But the policy reinforced and accelerated the transition. In India fertility is falling without anything remotely comparable to China's coercive system.

The real risk is a policy that changes too late

Once fertility is low, governments can remove restrictions but cannot order families to have more children. The decision to have a child depends on housing costs, education, employment, marriage patterns and expectations about family life. Government incentives can influence those calculations, but they cannot easily erase a social norm that has developed over decades.

China is discovering this now. After abandoning the one-child policy, Beijing introduced a series of measures to encourage births. More recently it has turned to childcare subsidies and other financial support, but births have continued to fall. The EAC-PM paper makes a similar point from the Indian experience. It warns that once fertility falls below what it calls a behavioural tipping point, changing the trend becomes difficult because smaller families become normal.

The difference between India and China is therefore one of degree and timing and not of direction. India's TFR of 1.9 is nowhere near China's current level of around 1.0. But several Indian states have already been below replacement fertility for more than 20 years which gives India more room to adjust policy before the national demographic structure becomes much older.

The national average can mislead

India's fertility transition is unusually uneven. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh remain important because their relatively higher fertility raises the national average. But the paper's calculation that TFR falls from 1.9 to 1.6 when those two states are excluded shows how misleading a single national number can be.

This geographical divide will matter more as India's population ages. States that reached low fertility early will begin experiencing a much slower growth in their working-age populations. At the same time, states that currently have higher fertility will continue producing a larger share of India's young workers.

The EAC-PM paper's numbers point to the beginnings of that divergence. The mature southern states have median ages approaching 35, while India's median remains around 30. The difference may appear modest, but over a large population it has substantial consequences for the size of the workforce, dependency ratios and demand for healthcare and elderly care.

It also creates a political-economy problem. States that successfully reduced fertility could eventually find themselves with older populations while states with higher fertility retain a younger population. That demographic divergence could become increasingly important for public spending and the distribution of economic resources.

India's old population-control machinery has outlived its purpose

The paper's argument is broader than simply asking whether India should encourage more children. It says the government should stop treating population reduction as an objective and recommends removing fertility reduction, population control and population stabilisation language from policy documents. It also calls for an end to sterilisation-linked incentive payments, including acceptor payments, wage-loss compensation and enhanced incentives for acceptors and service providers.

The paper specifically recommends repealing motivational payments linked to terminal methods and the ASHA incentive connected to limiting couples to two children. It also calls for ending family-planning awards and campaigns framed around population control, as well as removing two-child norm disqualifications across states.

That does not amount to an argument against family planning. The paper explicitly distinguishes population control from reproductive healthcare, contraception, birth spacing and individual choice. A family that wants two children should have access to contraception, and so should a couple that wants to delay a birth. But a state that continues to reward sterilisation because it wants fewer births is operating with a demographic objective that may no longer fit the country it is governing.

China's mistake was not simply having a one-child policy

The deeper lesson from China is about policy inertia and not just its one-child policy because China's demographic problem was not created entirely by that one policy. Economic development and social change were already reducing fertility. But the state continued to push in the same direction after the demographic conditions had changed. By the time policymakers reversed course, the social consequences of low fertility had become much harder to unwind.

India has an opportunity to avoid that timing problem. The country's annual births have already fallen by roughly 6 million from their 2001 peak. In large parts of India, fertility has been below replacement for a generation. And the working-age population has not yet aged to anything like China's current demographic position.

That;s why the EAC-PM paper's argument is less about promoting population growth than about recognising a changed reality. India's old population-control framework was designed for a country worried about too many births but today the numbers suggest that, in much of the country, the more relevant question is what happens when there are too few births. China's experience suggests that waiting until that problem becomes obvious may leave policymakers with far fewer options.