Why India’s south thinks it has to populate or perish

By Mihir Sharma

This month, the veteran technocrat Chandrababu Naidu — chief minister of Andhra Pradesh — told the state legislature that his government would pay women to have additional children. He and his counterparts in other southern states are desperate to escape the sheer weight of numbers in the country’s north.

Naidu promised women Rs 25,000 ($265) if they had a third child, and also suggested extended maternity leave and a longer period of free education. But in India, as elsewhere in the world, such policies are likely to fail; when given a choice, women have children on their own schedules, and not those set by politicians.

The sight of a senior lawmaker urging families to have more children would have been inconceivable in the India in which I was born. After all, for decades governments have nudged, coaxed, and sometimes bullied their populations into doing the exact opposite.

No more fitting epitaph could be found for Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist who died this month, and is most famous for being so moved by a Delhi evening crowd that he immediately prophesied the imminent collapse of human civilisation. As my colleague Daniel Moss has pointed out, such apocalyptic predictions were both incorrect and damaging.

Naidu says that he is concerned that his state’s total fertility rate, the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime, has fallen to 1.5 — about the same as in several European countries, such as Hungary. He wants to get it back up to around 2.1, the “replacement rate” at which populations stabilise; otherwise, he warned, the working-age population would fall and economic growth would plateau.

Andhra Pradesh isn’t the only part of India faced with low fertility rates. Other parts of southern and eastern India have similar problems. The lowest rates in India are found in urban Bengal — including the city of Kolkata, where I’m from — where government figures indicate a TFR of 1.1, lower than Japan.

But growth isn’t the real reason Naidu is worried. He and his colleagues in the south and east are anxious not just because their populations will stagnate or shrink, but because other parts of India are still adding more people. It isn’t the absolute size of their populations that threatens them, but their increasing insignificance relative to the larger, poorer, states of the north.

According to projections from India’s official economic survey, Andhra Pradesh’s population will stay at its 2016 level of just over 50 million for the next decades. Meanwhile, two northern states — Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — will grow from 300 million to almost 420 million people.

This would permanently unbalance India’s democracy in favor of the north. We haven’t seen the effects of this yet because constituencies haven’t been reallocated across states for decades. In India’s parliament, Bihar has 40 seats and the southern state of Tamil Nadu has 39 — because they had similar populations in 1971, the last time redistricting occurred. If we were to go by today’s population numbers instead, Tamil Nadu might lose 10 or more of those seats.

The south and east are already outnumbered; if their relative population size continues to shrink, they will be rendered insignificant. Yes, population growth in the north will eventually slow down as well; but it will stabilise at a much higher level.

In other words, southerners aren’t fighting economic stagnation, they are railing against a future in which they fear they will be politically eclipsed by people with whom they believe they have little in common ethnically, culturally or linguistically. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that their politicians are responding to this demographic anxiety the same way those in Hungary or Korea are: With a calibrated mix of xenophobic dog-whistles and pro-natalist policies.

Neither of these will work. Viktor Orban has spent his career loudly and expensively defending Hungarian civilisation against declining birthrates. Spoiler: He lost. And even if India’s south somehow does better and finds an effective way to reverse demographic decline, it will take a quarter of a century for this miracle to result a single eligible voter to balance the tens of millions being born in the north.

Chandrababu Naidu is India’s original technocrat. He is proud of having helped build India’s IT services success. He hasn’t yet given in to the temptation to turn demographic anxiety into ethnic exclusion and ugly anti-migrant politics. His urbane colleagues across the south have mostly been similarly cautious — so far.

Naidu also knows, probably, that the forces behind his and his state’s success — education, urbanisation, female empowerment — also drive down the birth rate. But he can’t say that out loud either. It’s far safer to announce meaningless pro-natalist policy.

I can’t predict how long such restraint will last. This is a situation for which India’s politicians are completely unprepared; our democracy will adapt for better or, more probably, for worse. It’s just that the sheer speed of the reversal has taken our politics by surprise.

India spent seven decades with population growth as its defining national emergency: A moral and economic crisis that demanded state intervention and, occasionally, coercion. In just a decade, that crisis has inverted so swiftly that state politicians are seriously wondering whether they should subsidise IVF treatments. The India of Ehrlich’s fevered, dystopian visions might have been easier to manage than one dealing with the very real possibility of demographic decline.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)