On the Future of Human Fertility in India

This paper addresses the issue of the trend and level of fertility in India during the coming decades. It takes as its starting point (i) the requirement to produce population projections which are as accurate as possible, and (ii) the fact that countries with fertility around or below the replacement level currently hold over forty percent of the world’s people. Since India contains one sixth of humanity, the future of its population is clearly of great interest. And the question of what will happen to the country’s total fertility rate (TFR) is crucial because it will doubtless be the most important variable determining by how much the population will grow.