A right-wing Hindu leader’s call for families in India to have more children has ignited debate over whether the world’s most populous nation should keep expanding to preserve its demographic edge.
Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the influential Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), triggered controversy earlier this month when he argued that India needed to increase its population as couples were having fewer babies.
India’s fertility rate fell from 5.9 children per woman in 1950 to 2.01 currently, based on local media reports. The latest figure is below the generally accepted replacement level of 2.1 – a number below this level typically signals the start of population shrinkage in the long term.
“This decline in population is a matter of concern. Modern population science says that when the [fertility rate] of a society goes below 2.1, that society vanishes from the earth,” Bhagwat said at a community gathering on December 1 in Nagpur, where the RSS is headquartered.
“We need more than two or three [children per family], this is what population science says.”
Experts have cautioned against seeing the fertility rate as a crisis. They say Bhagwat’s comments reflect fears among some Indian leaders that the majority Hindu population could be overtaken by Muslim minorities or that India’s economic performance could soon mirror the slowdown in Japan and China, both of which are ageing due to a continuous decline in their fertility rates.