Govt should roll-back population control rules, incentives: EAC-PM Working Paper

India should move away from population control as an objective of state policy and realign its family planning framework with the country’s changing demographic reality, said Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), in a working paper, suggesting government roll-back population control rules and incentives.

“We need to overcome our population control mindset and align our policy objectives with the new demographic reality,” he said in the paper, titled ‘the Ghost of Population Past’and co-authored by Aakanksha Arora, director, EAC-PM and Virat Singh, consultant, EAC-PM.

“The historical experience of other countries shows that once fertility declines below a behavioural tipping point, and alters social norms, it is very difficult to reverse,” it said, adding there is no need for us to suppress the total fertility rate (TFR) any further and risk falling into a low-fertility trap sooner.


According to the paper, the government must end sterilisation-linked incentive payments by rolling back all direct benefit transfer payments, including acceptor payments, wage-loss compensations, and enhanced incentives to acceptors and service providers, related to sterilisations.

“Repeal motivational payments and incentive payments tied to terminal methods and the ASHA incentive related to limiting couples to two children,” it said.

“Discontinue all family-planning related awards, World Population Day celebrations and Vasectomy Fortnight observances that call for population control along with repealing the two-child norm disqualifications across all states,” it added.

The paper also called for removing all fertility reduction, population control or ‘stabilisation’ language from national and state policy frameworks and outputs.

“We would like to point out that we are not against family planning for reasons of health, child spacing or personal preference,” it clarified, adding that population control is no longer relevant as an objective of state policy.

According to the paper, the national total fertility rate (TFR) of India is 1.9, well below replacement fertility. In the absence of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the TFR stands at 1.6.

“This is comparable to Northern Europe (1.5) and the United States (1.6). The demographically mature Southern states, namely Andhra Pradesh (1.4), Telangana (1.5), Karnataka (1.5), Kerala (1.3) and Tamil Nadu (1.3), alongside states like West Bengal (1.3), Punjab (1.4), Goa (1.6), Himachal Pradesh (1.5), Sikkim (1.0), Maharashtra (1.4), and Delhi (1.2), have been below replacement fertility for over two decades now,” it said.

“With a median age of almost 35 years, these states are demographically closer to ageing economies like the United States (39), than to our national median age of 30 years,” it cautioned.

The paper said that the annual number of births in India peaked at roughly 29.3 million in 2001 and has reduced by one-fifth since then, to about 23.2 million births in 2023. At the current juncture, India is at the same level of births it had about fifty years ago in 1974, it added.