India’s demographic story has taken the country by storm, especially since The Economist, as part of a cover story this month, highlighted that the country's fertility rate was falling below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Around the same time, initial results from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2023-24 showed that India’s total fertility rate was 2.0, and the data from the Sample Registration System showed an even lower figure of 1.9 for 2024.
This is not unusual, given the decline in fertility rates worldwide over the past decade. Yet India’s situation—low fertility co-existing with low female labour force participation—is puzzling, as highlighted by the magazine. This contradicts the conservative view that fertility drops when more women start working outside the home. This seeming anomaly in fertility trends can be explained by the impact of cultural, social and economic circumstances on the average Indian woman.
The marriage penalty
Around the world, it is common for women to step back from the workforce around the birth of the first child. As a result, their earnings fall below those of similarly qualified men: a gap known as the “motherhood penalty”.
Indian women face a “marriage penalty”. Well before childcare responsibilities start, they drop out of work for reasons including additional domestic responsibilities (household chores, elder care), social norms, or simply the fact of relocating to the husband’s home in another city.
The disproportionate load of household work borne by women is confirmed by time use surveys: married women spend more than five hours on unpaid domestic chores and over an hour on domestic caregiving, while married men spend less than an hour on both put together.
A 2024 World Bank study showed that, on average, marriage reduced the labour force participation of Indian women by 12 percentage points; having a child pulled it further down but by a modest 4 percentage points. In other words, most of the damage to women’s labour force participation occurred around marriage.
Yet marriage in India is near-universal: only 1% of women and 3% of men had never married by the age of 45-49 years (NFHS 2019-21). The average woman marries early (median age at first marriage among women aged 25-49 years was 18.9 years), and her first child is also born quickly (median age at first childbirth: 21.2 years). For women with 12 or more years of schooling, marriage and childbirth are delayed by about three years, but it is still far lower than the 29-30 years of age at which women in advanced countries have their first child.
The combination of early marriage and labour market hurts the ability of women to find and hold steady jobs and to build resilient career skills. Research shows that women enter and exit the labour force in waves, as they try to balance available work with family commitments (Deshpande, 2021). Indeed, this is the reason why more women turn to gigs or informal jobs that offer flexibility, but may also come with lower pay and weak contracts.
This works both ways; the more volatile a woman’s working trajectory, the less likely she is to be hired. Women’s precarious position in the labour market makes them vulnerable to economic downturns. For instance, during the 2020 covid lockdown, 47% of working women lost their jobs as against 7% of working men (State of Working India Report 2021).
Let’s bring these points together. Marriage burdens women disproportionately with domestic work on top of outside work; and childbirth adds to the load. But societal norms make marriage, followed by at least one child, almost compulsory for most Indian women.
The cost of raising a child is rising rapidly in urban as well as rural areas, as parents aspire to provide the best for their children. Exposure to the internet and social media amplifies these aspirations. Having fewer children makes it possible to fulfil these dreams economically. In the past, policies were focused on population control and limiting family size to one or two children. Indeed, it appears that this messaging has been successful across income and education categories.
The Swedish lesson
There are no short-term solutions for raising fertility, which is closely linked to gender attitudes and female labour force participation. In fact, once TFR starts falling below replacement, it is impossible to push it up without improving the other two. Thus, cash handouts—as announced by some Indian states—will have a limited effect in isolation. But combined with measures that allow women to stay in the workforce, it could be more effective.
Consider the experience of Sweden, which offered paternity leave as early as 1974 and added generous paid parental leave, high-quality public childcare, and other family-friendly policies in the following years. The outcome was fantastic: by 1990, female labour force participation rose to 83.4%, and TFR crossed the replacement rate.
To be sure, Sweden poured 3-4% of its GDP into family benefits, year after year. India may be hard-pressed to match that outlay. There’s no denying that existing public schemes have made strides in empowering women, especially in terms of girls’ education. The next step is to get them into the labour force and keep them there; extend beti bachao, beti padhao to beti ko kaam dilao.
Policies like subsidized reskilling of mothers returning to the workforce, more flexible jobs in the formal sector, and formalization of care-giving infrastructure will help. But the starting point is to realize that declining fertility is only the symptom; the deeper underlying malaise is a lack of societal and institutional support for women who want to—and can—contribute economically as well as reproductively.