 Hopes, Dreams and Anxieties: India’s One-Child FamiliesAlaka Basu and Sonalde Desai () MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Abstract: While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition. Keywords: India; Low Fertility; Middle Class; Demographic Transition; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Asian Population Studies 12.1(2016): pp. 4-27 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:117304 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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