Most global reports on demographic patterns often glaze over issues that are of significance to large countries like India. For its flagship annual report of 2025, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) conducted a survey along with YouGov of more than 14,000 men and women across 14 countries that, together, are home to more than 37 percent of the world’s population. The aim was to learn about the fertility aspirations and achievements of individuals, and to understand the challenges they have experienced, if any, and the way forward. India was one of the countries studied.
Let me begin with what I believe to be India’s most important demographic concerns today, which are mostly not highlighted in the UNFPA report. First, a couple of years ago, India became the world’s most populous country, from being the second most populous since 1947. India’s population at independence was 350 million, against China’s 550 million in 1951. China’s leaders invested heavily in women’s education and the health of its population in the first three decades after 1949. They reaped the benefits when their country became the world’s second-largest economy and a veritable superpower.
Had India’s policymakers understood the importance of education and health (including nutrition) for its population, especially in the Hindi belt, our population would not be expected to peak in 2065 at over 1.65 billion. It will continue exacerbating the vicious cycle of population growth, environmental degradation and poverty unless policy corrections occur faster.
Second, India’s demographic dividend began in the early 1980s and will end in 2040. During this time, the share of the working-age population is rising, and that of the dependent population falling, which would mean an attendant economic growth if the right economic policies create enough non-farm jobs. Thus, far from what policymakers believe, India is no more a youthful country, but is a rapidly ageing one. The working-age population will start shrinking from 2041.
The demographic dividend is a golden period when the young are getting better educated and desperately need non-farm jobs. However, in India today they are still not getting those jobs in the numbers needed.
There are four dimensions to the looming jobs crisis, which our governments are not willing to recognise: the young joining the labour force each year; the currently unemployed; the youth not in education/ employment/ training and willing to work, but not looking for work, hence are ‘discouraged’ workers; and the millions underemployed that need to be pulled out of agriculture.
Third, the first point mentioned above is tied to the fact that India’s population problem has essentially been a Hindi belt problem, and is now one confined to three large northern states—Bihar (with a total fertility rate of 3), Uttar Pradesh (2.7) and Jharkhand (2.4), the only major states with TFRs above the replacement level, while India’s overall TFR is 2.0.
UNFPA 2025 tells us that global fertility rates have declined from an average of 5 children per woman in 1950 to 2.25 in 2024. So India, as a whole, is doing better (except for the three large states) than the world average, although it will need to do much better.
These are also the three states with the highest ‘unmet need’ for family planning—an indication of the failure of successive governments in these states. While the national average for unmet need is 12.9 percent (National Family Health Survey 2021), in UP it is 18.1 percent and in Bihar 21.2 percent. These numbers speak volumes about the lack of reproductive health services in the two states that together account for a fourth of India’s population.
But unmet need for family planning is only the tip of the iceberg. The real issue runs deeper: in Bihar, 42.5 percent of girls are married by the age of 18, whereas the overall rate for India is 26.8 percent. That gives the lie to all the talk about ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’. Clearly, the public health messaging system is not working and schools are not teaching the most important lessons on fertility. UNFPA 2025 reminds us that gender inequality continues to impact fertility aspirations, with women often bearing the brunt of societal expectations—and the Hindi-belt states are no exception.
The effects of our reproductive health system’s failure get worse. Currently, the use of ‘any family planning method’ in India is only at 53.5 percent—that is, nearly half of Indian couples don’t use any family planning method. But in UP, it is worse, at only 41.5 percent for ‘any method’ and 31.7 percent for ‘any modern method’. For Bihar, these numbers are even worse at 24.1 percent and 23.3 percent, respectively.
The UNFPA’s survey in 14 countries showed that nearly one in three respondents said they or their partner had experienced an unintended pregnancy. So, with low use of family planning and high incidence of child marriage, should we be surprised if UP and Bihar are still ‘star’ performers when it comes to high fertility rates? Such performance has larger consequences for these states and the country as a whole.
It means they also have remained with the lowest per capita incomes among all states. Even their distance from the national mean per capita income has increased consistently over the decades.
Another result is India’s metro and Tier 2 cities have become living nightmares. As India urbanises (thanks to mass migration from mainly the Hindi belt to other states) in increasingly haphazard ways, and as the population rises to 1.65 billion over the next 40 years, the rest of India’s cities and towns will become incrementally unlivable.
Meanwhile, there is yet another crisis looming—an ageing society. Half of India’s current workforce of 610 million, is over the age of 45. In 15 years, these workers will retire. “There is no reason for population ageing to come as a surprise today,” demographers note (UNFPA 2024). What should be “most startling, then, is not the speed at which the world is changing, but our collective resistance to navigating these changes with preparation and circumspection”, notes UNFPA 2025.
Yet, India’s leaders seem unaware of the crisis of ageing, nor are they seen to be doing enough about the sustained high fertility, low contraceptive use and high incidence of early marriage in some states.
Santosh Mehrotra | Former Chief Economist, global Human Development Report and architect of India’s second HDR
(Views are personal)