Summary
Despite surpassing China as the world’s most populous country, parts of India are encouraging higher birth rates due to concerns over declining fertility and rapid aging.
Southern states like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, where fertility rates are below replacement levels, fear losing political representation and federal revenue after upcoming electoral boundary reforms.
India also faces challenges of an aging population with inadequate social infrastructure.
Experts call for policies promoting active aging, extended working years, and better use of India’s demographic dividend to address economic and social pressures.
Here is India’s population pyramid.
There is a clear swell in the population aged around 20 years old which will be fantastic for the country in the next few decades as they will have a surplus of people in the most productive years of their lives, growing the economy massively. However, right after this glut of workers there is a rather sharp decline in population which means that once these boom time people start retiring, and therefore no longer producing economic output, they will then have to be supported by the suddenly much less numerous younger generation. Meaning there will be more people living off of the work of fewer, that won’t be comfortable.
That’s why they want more babies, to lessen the blow of an aging population.
It’s no different than the pyramid for most countries around the world.
Indeed this is a problem that basically all rapidly developing countries have/will/are facing. Japan is famously struggling with their aging demographic right now, China is coming in 10-20 years, Russia is gonna have a particularly nasty time in about 30 years, Italy quite a bad one in just a decade. Plenty of emerging economies like Egypt, Philippines, and Rwanda are likely having their booms right now. At the same time many western countries have benefited greatly from immigration smoothing out their age demographic brackets since immigrants tend younger.