Fertility rates exceed target in a fourth of India

More than a fourth of India, geographically, has fertility rate of over three per cent, putting a massive roadblock in controlling the country’s burgeoning population.

The ideal total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children born per woman, being targeted by the government is 2.1 per cent. However, in 23 districts — 11 in Uttar Pradesh, eight in Bihar and two each in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh — the rate is higher than 4 per cent; while in 123 other districts across seven states the TFR stands between three and 3.9 per cent.

These 123 districts will be the target for ‘micro-planning’ to stabilise the country’s population, Minister of Health, JP Nadda, said on Monday, World Population Day.

Nadda said that considering the peculiarities of the issues in each district, these districts need strategies that reflect and address the local concerns.

“One good thing is we can say that we are going in the right direction. We have to increase the pace. About 24 States have reached 2.3 per cent (TFR). We have to strategise for states which have not brought it down,” he said.

Some of the states with high fertility rates also have some of the highest incidents of early marriage of women under 18 years of age. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS 4) 2016, released in January in Bihar 39 per cent of the women in the 20-24 years age group were married before 18 and in Madhya Pradesh the figure stood at 30 per cent. The statistics for Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan were not available.

In Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, about 12 per cent of women in the 15-19 years age bracket were already mothers or were pregnant.

“Investments in adolescent and young girls, especially teenage girls to influence their health outcome and consequently the overall wellbeing are an absolute necessity. This can be ensured by focusing on women’s empowerment and a right’s based approach to reproductive health to address the special and unmet needs of women and adolescent girls,” Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, The Population Foundation of India, said in a statement.

Further, while some of the indicators, such as those of early marriage, improved between NFHS 3 and 4, the use of family planning methods has declined in states such as Bihar (use of modern methods declined from 29 per cent in NFHS 3 to 23 per cent in NFHS 4) and Madhya Pradesh (use of modern methods dipped from 53 per cent in NFHS 3 to 49 per cent in NFHS 4).

“We urge government agencies and all stakeholders to commit to improving quality of care and providing a wider basket of spacing methods to the youth; increase financial investments; and accord a higher place in government priorities towards addressing the unmet needs of the country’s vast adolescent population,” Muttreja said.

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