To make babies or not to, that’s the question!

The Indian wedding season is upon us, and uncles and aunts everywhere have got their eyes once more on unmarried millennials. “When will you get married and have kids?” one of them grumbled to me recently.

In all fairness, the more hopelessly romantic one is, the longer one is likely to stay single (just ask Hollywood). But it’s the second part of that question that is spooking many millennials, whether single or married.

Born into a world of wars and pandemics, many millennials are starting to frown upon child-rearing as a ghastly burden. The anti-child movement is becoming so widespread in India that a whole new support group was founded a few years ago — provocatively named, “Child-Free India”. That group has since received endorsement even from the old. “I always had the feeling that I was not ready to become a parent,” grumbled one grandmother from Pune. “But I never had the courage to go against society.”

You might call child-free millennials lazy, but they do enjoy credible support. For decades now, more than a handful of Indian policymakers and economists have been arguing that population growth portends India’s doom.

Last month, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country, with a whopping 1.425 billion people. India added 300 million in the last 20 years alone — almost as much as the entire population of the United States (a country whose ‘tiny’ population is freaking out about ‘growing immigration’). And though fertility rates have been falling across India, the juggernaut rolls on.

Few would consider India’s population growth sustainable in the long term. If you think that India is already ridiculously crowded and chaotic, you’re statistically correct. India is, in fact, three times as crowded as China already: China has about 153 people for every square kilometre. India has 453.

Meanwhile, unemployment continues to grow. Food remains scarce. And scientists now say that more than 90 per cent of the country will roast under heatwaves in the years ahead.

Yet, if Indians stop having kids now, that will set up the prospect of a whole other disaster. If fewer babies are born today, fewer workers can create wealth a generation from now, even as many of us age and become more dependent on them for healthcare and social security.

Take China again — a country that is probably the same as India, only 20 years ahead. In 2000, China spent $55 billion on healthcare. By 2021, it was spending nearly $1.2 trillion, because Chinese people lived longer and got older. The problem is that as the Chinese got older, many of them also inevitably quit working. But there were progressively fewer workers to replace them and keep up economic growth. Last year, China registered a decline in population for the first time in decades.

If China is struggling, India’s impending troubles look way scarier. Today, the Chinese economy produces five times what India does, and the average Chinese person earns almost three times the average Indian (even after accounting for price differences). If India is to catch up to at least China’s (frankly inadequate) level before its people get old, it’ll require a growth rate ramp-up that would make M S Dhoni seem a dull finisher.

So, should Indians have kids, so that there will be more workers, but in an impossibly crowded and impoverished economy? Or should they put a stop to the cycle and just cave in to the child-free movement? I don’t really have a good answer, but if you do, feel free to offer it to a confused millennial at the next wedding you attend.