The draft Population Management Policy recently unveiled by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu marks a continuation of the State’s long record of intrusive demographic engineering. The new population policy attempts to raise fertility, from a total fertility rate of around 1.5 towards replacement levels by offering financial incentives for a third child, extended maternity benefits, subsidised fertility treatments and childcare support.
Among the southern States, AP has long stood apart for adopting a rigid, neo-Malthusian approach to population control, often at the expense of women’s reproductive autonomy. The policies extended into coercive disincentives including barring couples with more than two children from contesting panchayat elections. Such measures effectively linked civic participation to reproductive behaviour, subordinating individual choice to demographic targets. By focusing narrowly on fertility reduction under the rubric of Reproductive and Child Health (RCH), AP allowed other critical dimensions of women’s health to deteriorate. It now records one of the highest hysterectomy prevalence rates in the country at 8.7 per cent of the women aged 15-49, nearly three times the national average of 3 per cent. The rate of caesarean deliveries is similarly alarming at 42.4 per cent of institutional births, double the national average of 21.5 per cent. Equally concerning is the persistence of early marriage. Nearly 29 per cent of women aged 20-24 in the State were married before the age of 18, more so in rural areas. The State’s aggressive population policy has prioritised demographic targets over holistic well-being.
These statistics point to systemic distortions in healthcare delivery where women’s bodies become sites of medical and policy excess. The shift now underway does not dismantle this framework; it merely inverts its objective. International experience offers little comfort. Countries such as South Korea, Japan and China have all deployed extensive incentives to boost fertility, with limited or no success. The lesson here is that financial incentives may alter the timing of births but they rarely change the number of children families choose to have. Fertility decisions are shaped less by one-off financial incentives than by factors such as education and housing costs, career pressures and the difficulty of combining work and family life.
AP’s policy raises a deeper concern about rights. Having once imposed limits on family size, the State now proposes to encourage larger families, without addressing the structural inequities that constrain women’s choices. If demographic anxieties are driving this shift, there are less intrusive solutions. Labour shortages can be addressed through inter-State migration, especially from other populous States such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The challenge is not the absence of people, but how effectively they are educated, employed and able to move to where opportunities exist.
Published on March 22, 2026