For every child free for adoption, 13 parents wait in line : Data

In Maharashtra, only 236 children are legally free for adoption, while 5,284 are in the CCIs. It will be a big leap to assume that these gaps are only due to the complexities stated above and the delay needs to be audited. The delay in declaring children legally free for adoption reduces their chances of getting adopted.

We did however do an analysis of the samples from West Bengal, Assam and the northeast together and the results were similar to the all-India results; hence, in the interests one child policy in india of parsimony, we present only the national findings here. A more interesting but also more ambiguous geographic distribution arises when we look at state level differences in the proportion of one-child families in Table 5. It appears that the highest levels of the one-child family exist in the Southern and Eastern (as well as the northeastern) parts of the country. Lest one thinks this is merely a consequence of lower average fertility in the South, it is interesting to compare state total fertility rates with the proportion of one-child families. A low TFR does not automatically lead to a higher proportion of one-child families.

Prevalence of young children in polygynous households in sub-Saharan Africa

We examine this expectation below and conclude that in fact there might be very different forces at work here. The one-child policy, officially implemented in China in 1979 until recently, and the unofficial gender-infanticide practices in India, first recorded in 1789 will be examined for their demographic impact and the paper will also discuss whether modern population control practices have decreased infanticide practices. Finally, the present intends to draw attention to an issue that has recently only marginally been hinted at, as it often echoes parochial understandings of the world, and that is whether practiced gendercide and strict population control policies can be distinct from the overall treatment of children, especially female. The feasibility of implementing a One-Child Policy in India is heavily scrutinized, citing fundamental differences between India’s democratic structure and China’s authoritarian regime. The paper discusses various socio-economic factors that may hinder the success of such a policy in India, including cultural attitudes towards childbirth, rising male preference leading to gender imbalance, and the challenges of an aging population.

Most importantly, by aggressively participating in regulating the use of these technologies, the Indian and Chinese states are also keenly redefining the intimate lives of their citizenry. This is seen most pointedly in the recent change in the shifts in the one-child policy of the Chinese state, and the newly drafted Indian Surrogacy Bill. In the late 20th century, both countries woke up to the need to manage the fallout of their population policies.

ii. Increasing voluntary childlessness and very low fertility

In spite of record levels of economic growth in the first decade of this century, the female labor force participation rate has stagnated (National Sample Survey Office 2013). Thus, it would be hard to argue that a rising tide of post-modern values shapes low fertility in India. Other aspects of family and reproductive life that seem to characterize the low fertility populations of Western, Northern and East-Central Europe include the kind of ideological transitions implicated in rises in cohabitation and declines in marriage, rises in divorce rates, rises in births outside formal marriage.

Table 2.

The one‐​child policy saw over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. In a similar vein, India’s Emergency saw 11 million sterilizations, many of them forced. China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition.

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• “Educating girls is the most effective contraceptive,” she said, pointing to data showing that Indian women with 12 years of schooling have no more than two children, while those with no education have an average of three, according to the latest survey results.
• In as much as our survey data lend themselves to examination of these competing motives, we find only a modest relationship between family size and markers of either personal consumption or personal fulfillment.
• This paper is giving an overview on previously performed research how family-planning-policies in China (explicitly the so-called One-Child-Policy) have affected economic growth since 1979.
• But the accelerated ageing of the population yields an increasing old dependency ratio.
• Since the late 1970s, China’s administration has been enforcing a one child policy to control the existing population growth rate (Greenhalgh 311).
• In this paper we have looked at the differences in the lifestyles of Indian families at various levels of fertility.

The sample is spread over 1503 villages and 971 urban blocks in 33 states and union territories. Unlike the National Family Health Surveys, the IHDS is not primarily a fertility survey but contains extensive data on income, employment, structure of family life and investments in children, allowing us to test some arguments about differences in family lifestyles in families with different fertility patterns. At the same time, deeper analysis of fertility and mortality statistics from IHDS compare well with NFHS-III conducted around the same time (Desai et al. 2010). However, if the path to below replacement fertility could be shown to also be paved by familiar economic forces rather than cultural shifts, perhaps we may see India experiencing below replacement fertility in the near rather than distant future. In this paper, we attempt such a reevaluation by looking at the emergence of a subgroup of the Indian population that seems to exhibit very low fertility.

Data shows that over 22,000 children are in the CCIs, 8.5 times more than the number of children legally free for adoption, in 2025 (2,652). The children in the CCIs include those orphaned, abandoned, surrendered by parents and those who have parents/guardians who are unfit for parenting or do not visit them. Moreover, we do not have any evidence to suggest significant levels of secondary or acquired sterility in India. Childlessness levels are certainly well within the range expected for societies in which STIs or RTIs have not had a major impact on primary sterility and where virtually all childless ness is involuntary (see Pathak and Unisa, 1993). Agrawal and Unisa (2002) suggest that there may be emerging differentials in childlessness within the country, but we have not included childless women in this analysis.

The child limit would not work in India as it did in China because it is a much more democratic country. Despite the obstacles, a child limit could be a reality with the use of enough resources. Education programs and other services would be very helpful in easing the transition.

Expenditure on children’s education is higher by 40% in one-child families than in families with three or more children; two-child families fall in between. Children from one-child families are 1.56 times as likely to be in a private school as children from 3+ child families, while children from two child families are 1.4 times as likely to attend private school. When we interact being a single child with the gender of this child, the relationship is even more intriguing (tables not reported here). Any negative impact of being a girl is limited to girls in 2+ child families; among one-child families parents do not distinguish between boys and girls.

• When barely 50% of enrolled children are able to read (Pratham 2005), it is not surprising that parents seek alternatives to government schools.
• Furthermore, this expansion of aspirations can be related to the nature of the rapid economic growth in the country.
• Issues such as infertility are no longer the only reasons why parents consider adoption”, said Gayatri Abraham, the founder of Padme, a comprehensive adoption resource platform for Indian parents.
• For all work, i.e. combining work on family farm, caring for livestock, and work in family business and wage work, women with a single child are actually less likely to be employed than women with larger families.
• The motives underlying the first demographic transition do not respect the arbitrary floor of a TFR of 2 that demographers have set up.
• The average delay for prospective parents to get an adoption referral has increased from one year in 2017 to three years by 2022, to about 3.5 years currently.

The emergence of the one-child family in India

For example, the emergence of extremely low fertility in Italy and Spain – some of the most conservative nations of Europe — has proven to be somewhat of an impediment for theories that rely on a shift to post-modern values to explain low fertility (Chesnais 1996; Kertzer et al. 2009). Similarly, research on low fertility in Eastern and Central Europe suggests that there can be a diversity in routes to lowest low fertility (Sobotka 2008). Much of the literature on fertility decline has focused on external and internal constraints to childbearing. We suggest here that it may be useful to flip this perspective and to consider that low fertility might be a response to new opportunities and to compare predictions based on constraints vis-à-vis predications based on new opportunities. Finally, we need to be sure that these one child families are not an unfortunate outcome of families ending up with fewer children than they would like; that is, they do not represent an unmet need for fertility. Hence, we try to establish the wantedness of the one child family by asking a series of questions about its bio-demographic and social correlates.

Not only will the policy help control head counts, but it will also provide any advantages socially and economically. Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”. What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking.

While this figure does not imply that they will necessarily stop at one child, it nevertheless reflects a new kind of ambiguity – many more women than expected are now willing to even entertain the possibility of stopping at one. But first, we try and place our study results in the context of the very low fertility literature on Europe and East Asia. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. As the 2022 UN report itself notes, no drastic intervention from the state is required.