Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility

Summary

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Episode Summary: "Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility"

Podcast: Economist Podcasts – The Intelligence
Air Date: June 5, 2026
Host: Jason Palmer
Featured Guest: Tom Sasse, South Asia Bureau Chief

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into a dramatic, and somewhat surprising, demographic transition in India: fertility rates are falling faster and further than anyone expected, with profound consequences for the future of Indian society and the global population. Host Jason Palmer and South Asia bureau chief Tom Sasse break down what’s driving India’s baby bust, how quickly demographic shifts are affecting even poorer parts of the world, and why traditional policy responses may not be enough to mitigate the economic and social challenges ahead.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Historical Context: From Population Explosion to Baby Bust

• In the 1950s and 60s, overpopulation was a dominant concern in India, with official campaigns urging families to have fewer children.
• “By the 1970s, things took a cruel turn. Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized, many of them forcibly.” – Jason Palmer [02:35]

2. Current State: India’s Fertility at a Historic Low

• The national Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has fallen to 1.9, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
• Some states, such as Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, have reached TFRs of 1.3—comparable to Finland.
• “Maharashtra… has a TFR of 1.4, which is the same as Norway.” – Tom Sasse [04:10]

3. A Shift in Paradigm: Demographic Whiplash

• After decades of warning about runaway population growth, India is now preparing for population decline—a reversal with deep consequences.
• “Now what you have is this kind of demographic whiplash… India is looking at this future that looks quite different, and that’s a future where its population could peak in about two decades, and then it could fall almost as sharply as it’s risen.” – Tom Sasse [04:44]
• This transition is already causing real-world effects: school closures in some states, rising demand for migrant labor, and rapid aging (despite India still being relatively poor).

4. The Global Decline: Poorer Countries Join the Club

• Historically, falling fertility was associated with development in rich countries, but now middle-income and even poorer nations are experiencing the same trend.
• “Sri Lanka has a TFR of 1.3. Tunisia is 1.6. Morocco has just fallen below replacement rate. One of the most striking examples is that Nairobi… may be approaching the replacement rate.” – Tom Sasse [06:30]
• These drops are happening even as marriage is near-universal and most women aren’t in the workforce—indicating deeper shifts.

5. Why is this Happening? Three Big Factors

• Girls’ Education: More schooling increases autonomy and lowers fertility. Where girls’ education hasn’t advanced (e.g., Niger, Chad), fertility remains high.
• Parental Aspirations/Educational Arms Race: As families focus on quality over quantity, they have fewer children but invest more in education. Private schooling is becoming the norm for 40% of Indian children.
• Culture and Tech: Small-family norms become aspirational, diffused even faster by smartphones and social media. “If you’re a poor woman in a village, you become more exposed to the lifestyles of richer peers in cities.” – Tom Sasse [07:36]

6. Implications for the World: Peak Human Sooner Than Expected

• “At the biggest scale, it means peak human is probably sooner than we think.” – Tom Sasse [08:56]
• Slumping fertility worldwide could mean fewer migrant workers available—meaning all countries may face workforce shortages.
• Countries may have only a brief “demographic sweet spot” before facing rapid aging and economic headwinds.

7. Policy (Non)Solutions & The Hard Part Ahead

• “There isn’t a great deal that you can easily do to move the needle. These fertility trends are driven by pretty deep economic and cultural forces.” – Tom Sasse [10:09]
• Financial incentives and exhortations have shown little effect in the West and are unlikely to work in India.
• The best approach: adapt to the new demographic reality—expand women’s workforce participation, improve pension and old-age care systems.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “In the 1950s, families were huge… Children were everywhere, and overpopulation was an obsessive concern.” – Jason Palmer [02:10]
• “Fertility has fallen really remarkably quickly and much more quickly than people had anticipated.” – Tom Sasse [03:38]
• “Demographic whiplash… India is looking at this future that looks quite different.” – Tom Sasse [04:44]
• “Almost 40% of Indian children are now going to fee paying schools.” – Tom Sasse [07:16]
• “Peak human is probably sooner than we think.” – Tom Sasse [08:56]
• “Whether to have a third child or not does not seem to be the kind of decision that parents can easily be nudged to make by, say, a cash incentive.” – Tom Sasse [10:13]
• “What these countries can be doing is… thinking about how to build systems for old age, care and pensions and Social Security.” – Tom Sasse [10:51]

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Memorable Moments

• Demographic Whiplash: The sharp reversal from overpopulation fears to concerns about rapid demographic decline.
• Girls’ Education as the Tipping Point: The episode highlights that the places now seeing fertility decline are those with earlier investments in girls’ education.
• Smartphones Spreading Small-Family Aspirations: Technology is accelerating cultural change in even the poorest villages.

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Segments & Timestamps

• [01:56] – Episode begins: Context about India’s historical population anxieties
• [03:38] – Tom Sasse on falling fertility and its speed/state-by-state comparisons
• [04:44] – Demographic whiplash and its implications for India’s future
• [05:46] – Global perspective & fertility falls in poorer countries
• [07:01] – Three key reasons for the fertility decline
• [08:49] – Global implications: “peak human” and development challenges
• [10:01] – Can anything be done? Likely policies and adaptations
• [11:04] – Wrap-up and thanks

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Tone & Style

The conversation is informative and analytical, balancing data-driven reporting with accessible explanations. The tone is pragmatic, occasionally wry, and grounded in The Economist’s signature clear-eyed, global perspective.

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Summary Takeaway

The Indian demographic story—once defined by growth—has entered a striking new phase: a baby bust. India’s (and the world’s) quick tumble below replacement fertility will demand not dramatic efforts to boost birth rates, but a wholesale rethinking of education, the workforce, and the social contract.

Understanding and adapting to this seismic shift—not just in India but worldwide—will be one of the defining challenges of the next quarter-century.

Transcript

[Nick and Jack]

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[Jason Palmer]

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[Jason Palmer]

The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. Today on the show, why it's so Hard to make Decent vegan cheese and a tribute to that colossus of the saxophone, Sonny Rollins. But first, In the India of the 1950s, families were huge. Parents might be one of six in their generation, grandparents might have 10 siblings. Children were everywhere, and overpopulation was an obsessive concern. By the 1960s, slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them two or three children enough. In the 1970s, things took a cruel turn. Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized, many of them forcibly. As recently as 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the unbridled population explosion happening in our Midst. Many new crises, he warned, created for our upcoming generations, things have taken a very sharp turn. Upcoming generations are getting smaller and fast, and that is a warning to the world.

[Tom Sasse]

India's experiencing a baby bust. In many parts of India, fertility has fallen really remarkably quickly and much more quickly than people had anticipated.

[Jason Palmer]

Tom Sasse is our South Asia bureau chief.

[Tom Sasse]

So if you look at the total fertility rate, a tfr, a measure of how many kids an average woman has over her lifetime, it's now 1.9 for the whole of India, and it's falling quickly. So that's below the replacement rate, which is what's needed to keep the population stable in the long run. But within that, you see some states that have fallen to levels that are comparable with rich countries in Europe. So Tamil Nadu, which is a big industrialized state in the south, and West Bengal in the east, have both got a TFR of 1.3. That's the same as Finland. And Maharashtra, which is a big Western State, has a TFR of 1.4, which is the same as Norway,

[Jason Palmer]

which is remarkable for a country that worried for so long about overpopulation.

[Tom Sasse]

That's right. So that has been the sort of dominant way that India has thought about this, and people have thought about India, and now what you have is this kind of demographic whiplash where suddenly India is looking at this future that looks quite different, and that's a future where its population could peak in about two decades, and then it could fall almost as sharply as it's risen. So that future isn't here yet. But the number of births in India have already peaked about 25 years ago, and that's going to translate into fewer people overall in the future. And this has happened for a lot of good reasons. But it also creates challenges that India is sort of hurtling through this demographic transition very quickly. In southern states like Tamil Nadu, you're already seeing that they're starting to close a lot of schools, having to import a lot of workers, and really start to think about how to build systems to care for the elderly. And that's all happening at a point when India remains relatively poor.

[Jason Palmer]

But it does fit into a far wider story. We've talked on the show a lot about declining fertility rates and the problems that will come with that.

[Tom Sasse]

That's right. But most people hadn't thought of that being a trend that happens quite like this in the poor world. So in the past, it's been thought of something that happens when you reach a certain stage of development. We've seen that story play out in the west, in East Asia, now increasingly in Latin America. But actually, if you look around the world now, over two thirds of all countries are below replacement rate. We see middle income countries, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Turkey, that have been a long way below that rate for a long time. But now poorer countries are joining them as well. Sri Lanka has a TFR of 1.3. Tunisia is 1.6. Morocco has just fallen below replacement rate. One of the most striking examples is that Nairobi, that's the capital of Kenya, may be approaching the replacement rate. These are not the kinds of places people think about when you think about low fertility. And you're seeing these kind of falls happen often despite marriage remaining near universal and often even though few women are working.

[Jason Palmer]

So why the change then? Why is this trend coming to poorer countries?

[Tom Sasse]

So I think you can look at three really big factors. So first of all, and demographers have emphasized this for a really long time, girls education. So when girls go to school, they gain more autonomy in life decisions. Fertility falls. It's no coincidence that in the 90s you saw a big surge in girls attending school in India and Africa. And that's starting to play out now. And in fact, the places where we don't see fertility falling now are the places where you still don't have much formal education for girls. So places like Niger, Chad or Northern Nigeria. And the second factor is that once you have that education, you see parental aspirations rise and then you get into a kind of educational arms race. So India's a great example of this. Almost 40% of Indian children are now going to fee paying schools. So a lot of parents are deciding to have fewer kids so that they can invest in sending them to better schools. And that's risen very substantially in the last few years. You can imagine a similar thing playing out in Africa as well. And the third factor is a bit harder to measure, but it's basically culture. So as it becomes aspirational to have one or two children, that then starts to spread within a country. And this is where people are starting to look at the role of smartphones. So smartphones could be really quite a powerful tool for diffusing these new types of cultural norms. So if you're a poor woman in a village, you become more exposed to the lifestyles of richer peers in cities. Now, we don't have really good studies yet that prove this, but it's a very interesting hypothesis for why these kind of effects might be happening more quickly in the poor world than we expected.

[Jason Palmer]

And what does that mean then on a global scale. If you're saying that a majority of countries now below replacement rate, what's the long run of that?

[Tom Sasse]

At the biggest scale, it means that peak human is probably sooner than we think. And we should be skeptical about claims that Africa is going to grow quite as large as some people have suggested in the past. I think it also means that potentially it will be harder for for all countries to bank on importing the kind of migrant labour that they might have thought they were going to to help them tackle worker shortages. If poor countries reach low fertility earlier, it probably adds another layer of difficulty to the task of development and getting richer. Not the only one. So that will be alongside old problems like building institutions, tackling corruption. And it's not to say that you can't get rich if you've gone through this demographic transition. So China and Vietnam are both examples of countries that actually went through this transition at an even lower level of wealth than India. But it does make it harder because it means that you don't have the wind at your back and it means that poorer countries maybe have a narrower window when they're going to be in this demographic sweet spot.

[Jason Palmer]

So what's to be done if we want to avoid the problems that you describe? What are the policies?

[Tom Sasse]

Well, I think what most countries are finding is that there isn't a great deal that you can easily do to move the needle. So these fertility trends are driven by pretty deep economic and cultural forces. And whether to have a third child or not does not seem to be the kind of decision that parents can easily be nudged to make by, say, a cash incentive. In India, you're probably going to see some of those types of policies that haven't really worked at all in the West. You'll probably also see religious leaders and politicians exhorting parents to go out and procreate more, and that probably won't work either. But what these countries can be doing is really starting to think about how to prepare for these new demographic realities. And that means things like getting more women into the workforce, thinking about how to build systems for old age, care and pensions and Social Security.

[Jason Palmer]

Tom, thanks very much for your time.

[Tom Sasse]

Thanks, Jason.

[Jason Palmer]

Tom's India reporting was one of our cover stories in print this week. Quick word about the other, the subject also of this week's episode of the Economist. Insider, our subscriber only video series. Insider gives you unprecedented access to our newsroom. Each week, our senior editors take you behind our journalism, from dynamic debates to the latest developing stories explaining what today's events mean for tomorrow. This week, my colleagues zero in on what we're calling Gen Z Socialism. It's not that Gen Z came up with it, or that every Gen Z backs it, but it's a strand of thinking precision engineered for the social media era, and many young people are buying into it. Mamdani in New York, Polanski in Britain, Melanchon in France. These leftists have swapped old school collectivist ideals for price controls, nationalizations, and to pay for it all, hefty wealth taxes. Our Editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, and a panel of our journalists unpack these selfish socialists policies and ask what their popularity means for mainstream politics. If you're a digital subscriber, Insider is already included in your subscription. Nothing extra to sign up for. And if you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips from Insider via the link in the show notes.

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[Wealth Management Advisor]

You didn't just say how can I provide these investments? You'd be how do I holistically provide everything? How do I bring in the legal, the accounting, all this and do it at a price point no one else is doing it.

[Sam Colbert]

Learn more about how we approach wealth [e-mail] integrated.

[Jason Palmer]

Okay, I've arrived into the studio to the smell of cheese, two pizza boxes, and the very expectant looking face of Sam Colbert, podcast producer. What's going on?

[Sam Colbert]

Hi Jason. So our producer very kindly has got us two pizzas here, one with normal cheese and one with vegan cheese. Now when I say vegan cheese to you, what comes to mind?

[Jason Palmer]

I wonder if it's made of real vegans.

[Sam Colbert]

Very good. I guess we'll find out when we open.

[Jason Palmer]

No, I mean in truth, I'm suspicious of Vegan cheese.

[Sam Colbert]

I gotta say, I think most people are. I am vegan, so this is the stuff I eat. But I feel like, as I've been speaking to people about this, most people who don't eat vegan cheese have had one experience of having had it and been totally turned off.

[Jason Palmer]

And so now you want me to suffer that same fate? Is that what's going on?

[Sam Colbert]

Now it's your turn. Okay, I think on top here we have a normal margherita pizza. I want to point out to you how beautifully the cheese is melted.

[John Fasman]

Right?

[Sam Colbert]

You've got that gooey stretch. Very pleasing. It looks delicious.

[Jason Palmer]

Looks and smells like a normal pizza.

[Sam Colbert]

Now here's pizza two.

[Jason Palmer]

Okay, first of all, they've started with shredded vegan cheese.

[Sam Colbert]

And what I want to point out to you is you can still see the shapes of the shreds. And this is what I've been told. It's a scientific problem where basically the vegan cheese locks up in place and doesn't quite do that nice melty, gooey thing that real cheese does. This turns out to be a very difficult scientific problem.

[Jason Palmer]

Okay, so talk me through it. Why is this such a tricky thing for science to solve when it has had such triumphs in, for example, ice cream?

[Sam Colbert]

So the problem has to do with casein. Milk consists of two proteins. There are whey proteins, and caseins. And casein is the building block of cheese. So this is the stuff that binds together fats and nutrients in a way that forms the network that gives cheese that nice gooey stretch. And then when that network matures, it gives it these complex, lovely flavors of an aged cheese. And you would think that you could swap out that casein for a plant protein, but plant proteins are structured entirely differently and can't at all do that thing. And so you have to find some other way to solve that problem.

[Jason Palmer]

Another way. What is the way to do it?

[Sam Colbert]

So if you go to a supermarket today and you look at the vegan cheeses on the shelf, the standard mozzarella type ve vegan cheeses, they are generally made of an oil and a starch. So often it's coconut oil. And you imagine coconut oil is solid on the counter, and then you heat it up and it melts. That's what you want cheese to do. That will be supplemented with tapioca starch. So if you think of a tapioca ball, it has that nice gummy, tacky stretch. Like in bubble tea.

[Jason Palmer]

Yes, exactly.

[Sam Colbert]

So you put those together and you get that nice melt and stretch. The Problem is, as we saw with our pizza, it only melts kind of. It tends to lock up. It also isn't very flavorful. Generally, the final product is pretty bland. And to recreate artificially the great taste of a nice ripened cheese, that would just be prohibitively expensive. And it also isn't very healthy. So it's high in saturated fat and has basically no protein, which you might expect in actual cheese.

[Jason Palmer]

When you say it would be prohibitively expensive, what's expensive and why?

[Sam Colbert]

Some flavors are very easy to replicate. So the orange flavor in an orange soda is a pretty simple, specific flavoring that is cheap to produce. And in theory, any flavor can be replicated by just recreating the right combinations of molecules. But cheese flavors are so distinct and varied that to recreate that combination of flavor molecules would just become so expensive that you couldn't achieve anything close to cost parity with actual cheese.

[Jason Palmer]

But this is surely the very kind of thing that a bunch of Silicon Valley types will be aiming to crack with the very latest science.

[Sam Colbert]

Yes, and a lot of Silicon Valley types have tried and there was a real heyday for this kind of effort. So five, 10 years ago, there was a boom in plant based foods. Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods had these enormous valuations and celebrity backers lined up to invest in them. You had Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio putting money behind Beyond Meat and people like Oprah Winfrey and Jay Z and Natalie Portman supporting Oatly, which is a big maker of oat milk. And so I spoke to people who wanted to do for cheese what those companies had done for burgers and oat milk. They wanted in on this plant based revolution. I interviewed a guy called Oliver Zahn who founded a company called Climax Foods in Silicon Valley. He had been a data scientist at Google and at SpaceX, and he promised to use AI to make a zero compromise vegan cheese that was, quote, better in every way than the real thing.

[Jason Palmer]

AI coming to the rescue of absolutely everything. Okay, so how to come out?

[Sam Colbert]

Well, for that particular company, the timing was unfortunate in that the plant based boom busted. So some of those companies, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Oatly, are now at a fraction of their former valuations. And there's been a real cool on venture capital money for plant based food research. Simultaneously, consumer demand has dipped. It did not meet the expectations of that moment. And so it turned out that for companies like Climax, making a zero compromise, vegan cheese was just harder and more expensive than anticipated. And they increasingly got squeezed by the changes in the market. And so for now, you have bigger companies that are trying to iterate, say, by adding a little protein without adding too much cost. But vegan cheese continues to wait for its breakthrough oat milk moment.

[Jason Palmer]

And we have here to prove that point one pizza, which you admit it, full disclosure, right out of the gate, you say is gonna suck. Sorry.

[Sam Colbert]

I want you to describe for me the taste, the mouthfeel of what you're about to experience.

[Jason Palmer]

I mean, not a lot of cheesy taste, it has to be said. It's really squishy. It's very salty. I don't know if they're compensating on the taste by adding more salt.

[Sam Colbert]

I think so. That's all part of it.

[Jason Palmer]

This is, this is not doing it, I'm afraid.

[Sam Colbert]

I guess I'll finish this pizza off.

[Jason Palmer]

That just became your lunch. Thanks very much for your time.

[Sam Colbert]

My pleasure, Jason.

[John Fasman]

Though he lived a mere two blocks away, Sonny Rollins hadn't noticed those steps on Delancey street before.

[Jason Palmer]

John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent and is standing in for Annro this week.

[John Fasman]

One summer day in 1959, he climbed up there. At the top, he found himself on the Williamsburg Bridge. Subway cars were rattling over, hooting boats passing underneath. All around him were pillars and abutments in which he could hide. Close above him was the open sky. Corny or not, it gave him a spiritual feeling to be there. This was the ideal place to practice his music, which was not just any music. His tenor saxophone, endlessly inventive, seamlessly melodic, percussive or romantic, was already famous. Since 1953, he had been cutting records as the leader of small bands. But in 1950, in 1966, came Saxophone Colossus, with tracks like the urbane Strode Road that put him in the same league as his heroes Charlie Bird, Parker and John Coltrane. His head was already full to bursting with scraps of musical material he had laid down over the years. Etudes his brother played on the violin, Fats Waller on the family's piano roll, jukebox tunes in bars, pop songs and ballads from cheap gramophones, and the jazz that sounded all over Harlem from clubs and open windows. The pianist Thelonious Monk, who you can hear him playing with on the Way youy Look Tonight, mentored him. And the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins lived up the street. He revered both of them, and from eight years old, toting the alto sax his mother had given him, he knew a musical life was for him, too. His improvisations drew on all of this. He loved playing quotes and after any number of rhythmic and harmonic variations, each one could be joined to another. An aria from here, an occasional swinging Broadway ballad like Story with a Fringe on Top from Oklahoma, a cheeky half heard riff. It was as if all music had a natural unity, and he believed it had. He would walk onto every stage with his mind a blank, waiting for a fresh thought or a fresh note to fall upon it. Because he played with Bird, Coltrane, the trumpeter Miles Davis and the drummer Max Roach, he was often a bebop star. But he wouldn't be pigeonholed that way. The freshness of bebop, when it appeared in the 1940s, with its speed, intricacy and long solos, certainly suited him. Its strictures didn't, because he was naturally free. He often fused jazz with calypso in homage to his mother, who came from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. St. Thomas was one of the most celebrated tracks on saxophone. Colossus, another Blue Seven mixed jazz with blues for a time. He got rid of pianists who annoyed him because they limited his harmonic range. He liked trios best, a drummer and a bassist faithfully following along, and he could lead them anywhere. For his jazz especially, he felt on the albums Freedom Suite, A Night at the Village Vanguard and Way out west, which was big picture stuff in which everything came together. It was the unification of music. It was all one God. Perhaps his serenity on stage and off, disguised his rough road to fame, because as a young man he saw Charlie Parker as his messiah and Bird was on drugs. He used heroin himself to see if he could end up playing like that. All it did was set him to stealing, for which he eventually served 10 months at Rikers Island. In 1955, after some tough rehabilitation, he was clean again and he stayed that way. It was Byrd himself who had told him to stop and consider what he had to give to music that set him thinking. He had always considered music like God Bless the Child, written by Billie Holiday, as a gift to him ever since he had blown his first notes as a child. He had been at Seventh Heaven then, and it continued with each performance, as with few exceptions, but some down days, he reveled in the gift he had been given. But the question was, was he truly giving back to his audiences or just playing for himself to mangle his own golden rule a bit? Was he doing to others as had been done to him? He never really found the answer to that question, but he was looking for that as much as for the ultimate sound. It seemed to be his karma ever to search for these things he'd got a lot of bad stuff he was paying for. But that was the purpose of being in this inconsequential world. To learn, to try, to get wisdom, to come back and try again if you didn't, and to keep on pushing that music as he had on Williamsburg Bridge, which for his multitudes of admirers was gift, gift and glory enough

[Jason Palmer]

John Fasman on Sonny Rollins, who's died aged 96. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jad Gill. Our deputy editor is Sarah Larnyuk and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producer is Henrietta McFarlane, our senior creative producer is William Warren and our senior development producer is Rory Galloway. Our producer is Anne Hanna and our assistant producer, Kunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Eleanor Sly, we'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence this week, it's a dive into the fire movement financial independence. Retire early, grow envious as self denying young folk devote their every moment and every penny into clocking out for good ever earlier, making the rest of us look like chumps.

[Wealth Management Advisor]

You didn't just say how can I provide these investments? You'd be how do I holistically provide everything? How do I bring in the legal, the accounting, all this and do it at a price point no one else is doing.

[Sam Colbert]

Learn more about how we approach wealth [e-mail] Integrated from globalization to innovation, sustainability

[Nick and Jack]

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