India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement levels. Explore the economic, social, and demographic implications of India’s fertility fork and its path to 2047
Raghunath Mahapatra
For much of the twentieth century, economic policy feared that population growth would outrun food, employment, and state capacity. Today, many advanced economies fear the opposite: shrinking populations, ageing workforces and slowing economic dynamism. Global fertility has fallen from nearly five children per woman in 1950 to around 2.3 in 2023, while nearly two-thirds of humanity now lives at or below the replacement fertility threshold of roughly 2.1 children per woman: the level required for populations to sustain themselves across generations without long-term decline. China’s population has begun shrinking, South Korea’s fertility rate has collapsed to near 0.7, and Japan’s median age now exceeds 49 years. Across advanced economies, pension burdens are rising even as workforce expansion weakens.
In 2016, demographer Ronald R. Rindfuss and his colleagues, in their study “The Emergence of Two Distinct Fertility Regimes in Economically Advanced Countries”, described this divergence as a “fertility fork”. Advanced economies, they argued, were no longer converging toward a common demographic pattern but splitting into two distinct regimes. Northern Europe and much of the Anglo-sphere stabilised closer to replacement fertility through stronger institutional support for working families, while East Asia and parts of Southern Europe slipped into ultra-low fertility traps shaped by intense work pressures, high living costs and weaker social support structures.
India now approaches its own fertility fork, but from a far more precarious position: unlike Europe, Japan or South Korea, India is entering demographic maturity before achieving broad industrial prosperity. India became the world’s most populous nation precisely as its fertility rate fell below replacement level to around 2.0. Nearly 68% of its population is in the working-age category of 15–64 years, and this demographic advantage may remain relatively favourable until the late 2040s: the demographic windows do not remain open indefinitely. Their economic value depends on whether labour can be transformed into productivity before ageing begins tightening fiscal and social pressures.
Historically, demographic dividends succeeded when workforce expansion coincided with labour-intensive industrialisation and expanding global trade. East Asia industrialised during an era when globalisation absorbed surplus labour on an extraordinary scale. Between 1990 and 2015, the world’s merchandise exports rose from roughly 13% of global GDP to more than 28%. Young populations became economically valuable because the world economy itself was integrating rapidly enough to convert labour abundance into manufacturing strength, export growth and rising incomes.
India’s transition is unfolding under far less forgiving conditions. The era of frictionless globalisation has weakened after the global financial crisis. Trade fragmentation, strategic tariffs, friend-shoring and geopolitical rivalry are reorganising supply chains across regions. Simultaneously, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are steadily reducing the traditional developmental advantage of abundant low-skilled labour. Earlier industrial powers entered ageing after becoming productive, and now India risks confronting ageing while still attempting mass structural transformation.
This is where the fertility fork acquires deeper economic meaning. The danger is not fertility decline alone; falling fertility is often a consequence of development itself. The real danger emerges when demographic transition outpaces productivity transformation.
India’s internal asymmetries reveal this tension sharply. Bihar’s fertility rate remains above 3.0, while Kerala and Tamil Nadu have long fallen below replacement levels, meaning India is simultaneously experiencing multiple demographic eras. Nearly 45% of India’s workforce still depends on agriculture even though agriculture contributes barely 15% to GDP: a sign that labour abundance has not yet translated into sufficient productive absorption. Female labour-force participation, though improving, remains well below the levels that accompanied East Asia’s industrial transitions. Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Human Capital Index estimates that a child born in India today will achieve only about half of her potential productivity under conditions of full education and complete health. Climate stress further compresses the demographic window. Heat exposure is already beginning to reduce labour productivity across construction, agriculture and other labour-intensive sectors. Thus, India’s demographic transition is colliding simultaneously with technological disruption, climate pressures and a more fragmented global economy.
India’s policy challenge must therefore move beyond the older language of population control toward the harder task of productive-capability creation. Labour-intensive manufacturing, educational quality, urban infrastructure, healthcare capacity, female workforce participation and institutional support for working families are no longer isolated welfare objectives; they are macroeconomic conditions for sustaining growth in an ageing century.
The true significance of India’s fertility fork lies here. Earlier industrial powers crossed demographic transition during an era of expanding globalisation, rising labour absorption and relatively benign geopolitical conditions. India enters this transition amid automation, climate stress and economic fragmentation and it’s a fact that demography can enlarge opportunity only temporarily. If productivity fails to deepen before dependency begins rising, demographic advantage can narrow into demographic compression. History rarely grants demographic windows twice. Whether India converts its population scale into enduring productivity before that window contracts may ultimately define not only the economic meaning of India@2047, but also whether the country grows old before it fully grows rich.
(The writer is a Former Senior Project Associate, HSS Department, IIT Kanpur. Views are personal.)