Fertility recovery in India’s below-replacement states: Limits and prospects

<title>Abstract</title> <p>India has entered the era of below-replacement fertility. In the National Family Health Survey (2019–21), the national total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.0 children per woman and 23 states were below the 2.1 replacement level. As state governments consider policies to raise fertility, the question is how much demographic scope for recovery remains. Existing studies have focused on fertility intentions, but recovery also depends on who remains exposed to childbearing. This paper develops a framework distinguishing three concepts: the limitation stock, women who have permanently exited childbearing through sterilisation, hysterectomy or infecundity; the prospect stock, women still exposed to childbearing; and the recovery prospect, those who also wish to have another child. Across the 23 below-replacement states, the limitation stock reaches 47.4%, of which 43.8 points come from sterilisation. Although 52.6% of currently married women remain exposed, only 41.3% of them wish to have another child, leaving 21.7% as the immediate recovery prospect. One additional birth to each would raise the pooled TFR from 1.79 to 1.95, whereas delaying one-child sterilisation would add only 0.011. If never-married women aged 20–49 experienced the age-specific fertility rates of currently married women, the TFR would rise by a further 0.52, to 2.48. Recovery within marriage is therefore inherently limited, because much of the remaining reproductive capacity has been permanently lost. These findings suggest that policies to support future fertility should place greater emphasis on family formation among younger cohorts, expand access to reversible contraceptive methods, and gradually reduce reliance on female sterilisation as the predominant family planning method.</p>