Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, announced that his coalition government would provide parents with $312 for the birth of a third child and $416 for a fourth child, as part of the state’s proposed population management policy.
This policy marks a decisive shift in the language of family planning toward what the government now calls “population care.”
The concern behind this decision is not entirely unfounded. Andhra Pradesh’s fertility rate has fallen, with the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5, which covers the period 2019-2021, estimating the state’s total fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman, below replacement level.
However, demographic concerns alone cannot justify a policy whose social and economic consequences could ultimately worsen the very crisis it claims to resolve.
The Andhra Pradesh Socio-Economic Survey 2024-2025 indicates that the decadal population growth had already slowed to 9.21 percent during 2001-2011, significantly below the national average of 17.70 percent. The population density in the state has always remained lower than the all-India average. However, the real question is not whether Andhra Pradesh has “too few people”, but whether it has been able to provide education, healthcare, employment, social security and dignity to the people already living there.
The origins of Andhra Pradesh’s current population concerns lie in the success of its previous population policies. The undivided state was the first in India to formulate a national population policy in 1997, three years before the National Population Policy of 2000. During the 1990s and early 2000s, successive governments, including the previous Naidu administration, promoted small family norms as an integral part of the state’s development strategy. The policy linked fertility reduction to improved health, education, and economic well-being, while a broad family planning program—largely centered on sterilization, especially female sterilization—rapidly expanded throughout the state.
At its peak, Andhra Pradesh carried out nearly 800,000 sterilization operations per year, among the highest figures in the country. Contraceptive use increased significantly and the state became one of the first major Indian states to approach replacement fertility, despite more modest social indicators than states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
The campaign proved effective enough in shaping reproductive aspirations themselves. In 1992-93, 64.8 percent of women with two children said they did not want any more children. This figure increased to 83.7 percent by NFHS-2 (1998-99) and 91.5 percent by NFHS-3 (2005-06), reflecting deep social acceptance of smaller families. The small family norm was further strengthened by measures such as the two-child eligibility requirement to run in local elections in 1994. Current concerns about below-replacement fertility are therefore not a sharp break with the past but, in part, a consequence of the demographic transition that previous policies helped to accelerate.
The current debate reflects a new challenge: how to respond to the slowdown in population growth while preserving achievements in health, education and social development?
The issue becomes more acute in light of Andhra Pradesh’s economic distress. The unemployment rate for people aged 15 and over stood at 8.2 percent between July and September 2025, well above the national average of 5.2 percent. Rural unemployment (8.5 percent) exceeded urban unemployment (7.7 percent), reflecting agrarian distress and weak growth in non-agricultural employment. Women face an even harsher reality: unemployment among rural women was 10.5 percent compared to 7.3 percent for men, while unemployment among urban women was 9.3 percent compared to 7 percent for men. Overall female unemployment reached 10.1 percent, almost double the national average for women.
Andhra Pradesh’s policy asks economically insecure households to bear costs that the state has failed to manage through development, thereby shifting the burden of demographic anxiety to households least able to bear it. A one-time payment of $312 or $416 cannot cover the ongoing costs of raising a child. NSSO data shows that prenatal, delivery and postnatal care costs an average of $665 in an urban private hospital and almost $187 in a rural public hospital. A third of rural deliveries and almost half of urban deliveries take place in private hospitals, before taking into account nutrition, education, health care, housing and transport.
The contradiction is even more stark given Andhra Pradesh’s debt burden. Public debt is expected to rise from around $59 billion in 2024-25 to more than $73.9 billion by 2026-27. Including off-budget borrowing, liabilities approach $104 billion and could reach $116.5 billion, raising questions about expanding family size incentives.
The strain is already visible in the state’s existing welfare system. Andhra Pradesh has faced repeated criticism over arrears and delayed payments under major health schemes such as the NTR Vaidya Seva scheme, with hospitals expressing concerns over rising unpaid dues. The government recently released around $95.5 million to clear part of these outstanding debts. A state struggling to maintain its existing social commitments can ill afford to encourage large families.
This policy is based on a deeply patriarchal principle: according to which women’s bodies can be mobilized to solve demographic problems. Even though the incentives go to families, the costs of repeat pregnancies are borne by the women. Without robust health care, child care, workplace protections, and reproductive autonomy, it is not empowerment. This shifts the burden of state failure onto women’s bodies and lives.
Moreover, this policy is based on a dubious assumption: that fertility can be significantly increased through financial incentives. Evidence in India and abroad suggests otherwise. Sikkim, with a fertility rate of around 1.1, introduced wage incentives, extended parental leave, childcare support, financial aid and subsidized IVF, but fertility remained extremely low. Likewise, despite decades of baby bonuses, tax cuts and childcare subsidies, Singapore’s fertility rate remains among the lowest in the world. China’s shift from a one-child policy to a three-child policy has not stopped the decline in births. Financial incentives can influence behavior at the margins, but rarely reverse long-term demographic trends.
If monetary incentives rarely reverse fertility decline, the real question is why they remain politically attractive. Part of the answer lies in the increasing politicization of demography.
While Naidu frames his policy in terms of aging and workforce needs, calls from Hindutva organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the ideological mentor of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, urging couples to have three children reveal how demographic concerns can mix with majoritarian anxieties. The risk is that a development challenge will be transformed into a demographic identity policy.
Instead, serious population policy should start elsewhere: with progressive structural reforms. It would invest in women’s education, employment, nutrition, safety and health care. This would reduce economic precarity so that families feel secure enough to make reproductive choices freely rather than under the pressure of immediate financial incentives. This would recognize that declining fertility rates in many societies are closely linked to insecurity, unemployment, rising costs of living and weak social protection systems.
It must be recognized that Andhra Pradesh shows some progress. Across Indian states, it remains among those with a relatively smaller gender gap in labor force participation, despite a relatively modest per capita gross domestic product (GSDP). Among all Indian states, Andhra Pradesh ranks second, behind Kerala, in terms of gender gap in labor force participation.
Yet these achievements coexist with troubling realities: persistent female unemployment, low gender parity in higher education among young people aged 18 to 23, agrarian distress and fragile job creation. This contradiction itself reveals the central question: the demographic crisis is inseparable from the development crisis.
What families need is not a financial incentive linked to childbirth, but lasting economic security and protection against uncertainty and deprivation. Absent this, Andhra Pradesh’s pronatalist shift could ultimately generate more hardship than hope, and more anxiety than demographic resilience.