India’s population will start to shrink sooner than expected

For the first time, Indian fertility has fallen below replacement level DELHI When something happens earlier than expected, Indians say it has been “preponed”. On November 24th India’s health ministry revealed that a resolution to one of its oldest and greatest preoccupations will indeed be preponed. Some years ahead of un predictions, and its own government targets, India’s total fertility rate—the average number of children that an Indian woman can expect to bear in her lifetime—has fallen below 2.1, which is to say below the “replacement” level at which births balance deaths. In fact it dropped to just 2.0 overall, and to 1.6 in India’s cities, says the National Family Health Survey (nfhs-5), a country-wide health check. That is a 10% drop from the previous survey, just five years ago. This is big news not just for India but, seeing that its 1.4bn people are nearly a fifth of humanity, for the planet. The number of Indians will still grow, because many young women have yet to reach child-bearing age. But lower fertility means the population will peak sooner and at a lower figure: not in 40 years at more than 1.7bn, as was widely predicted, but probably a decade earlier, at perhaps 1.6bn.