Resolving India’s population woes requires political maturity

The best solutions are to be found in getting politicians to behave apolitically and look at the long-term future of the country, not their own immediate gains.

Population growth in India is on a downward trajectory. Economist Shamika Ravi, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recently commented on X that fertility rates in more than three-quarters of India’s states are now below what is required to maintain population levels.

For the world’s most populous country, with a population over 1.45 billion, this should be an occasion for celebration, especially given its overburdened infrastructure and scarcity of resources.

But many of the country’s leaders don’t seem pleased with this state of affairs.

Chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, two progressive and relatively prosperous states in the south of the country, have been calling on their constituents to have more children. The central government, led by Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, appears hellbent on parliamentary reforms that would reduce the representation of states that managed to curtail their population growth while awarding states that continue to grow with more seats.

If all this appears illogical, it’s worth remembering that what makes short-term sense politically often does not make sense in any other way.

So why are some Indian leaders not happy with the country’s apparent success in bringing population growth under control, and why are they actively trying to incentivise Indians to have more children?

For one, the decline in population growth is not uniform across the country. Some of India’s most populous and poorest states are still growing rapidly, increasing