India made history recently. Decades of government efforts to control the population growth are finally showing the much-needed result.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) — which is the average number of children who would be born to any women in her lifetime – has declined from 2.2 in 2015-16 to 2.0 in 2019-21. It was revealed in the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey, or NFHS-5, conducted over two years starting in 2019.
India’s TFR of two is currently below the replacement level of fertility of 2.1 children per woman.
Replacement level fertility represents the level at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next, thus leading to zero population growth if the level sustained over a sufficiently long period