Departing from decades of family-planning policies in India, the Andhra Pradesh government has proposed new incentives for families in the State to have three or more children. The State’s total fertility rate has dropped from around 3 in the 1990s to 1.5 today, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 as well as the national average. According to some projections, nearly a quarter of the State population will be elderly by the mid-century, resulting in a smaller workforce relative to the old-age dependency burden. But while South India is ageing faster than the North, the evidence for cash incentives leading to larger families and doing so without significant socio-economic trade-offs is weak. At present, Andhra Pradesh has proposed ₹30,000 for a third child and ₹40,000 for a fourth; ₹1,000 monthly for five years; free education until the age of 18; provisions for mothers to work from home; enhanced funding for the ‘Thalliki Vandanam’ scheme, which currently pays ₹15,000 per child for school attendance; longer maternity leave; and other Anganwadi and childcare support. While one-time payments may encourage some families to have children earlier than planned, evidence from India and around the world indicates that they rarely produce large or sustained increases in fertility.

People in the State are having fewer children likely because housing and private education have become more expensive, stable employment is accessible later rather than sooner, and aspirations around children’s quality of life have expanded. The proposed incentives are unlikely to offset the 18-year cost of raising one additional child even under optimistic assumptions about public provisions. The State government has also said that it wants to double women’s labour force participation, which is antithetical to having more children with the existing social infrastructure. Indeed, France and the Nordic states were able to maintain this two-pronged success only by investing heavily in universal childcare, flexible working arrangements, paid parental leave, high-quality public schooling, and legal protections against career penalties that mothers are at risk of. Otherwise, as is already prevalent in India, mothers end up absorbing more unpaid care work and cannot enter the workforce. Crucially, the economics of the proposed incentives are more likely to influence poorer households seeking immediate cash, leading to an uncomfortable possibility: the State modestly increasing the size of economically vulnerable families without guaranteeing adequate long-term support for child development. Finally, ecological concerns such as water scarcity, urban congestion, waste management, and recycling will also be tested in the long term. While the southern States are anxious about population-based delimitation, asking families to alter personal decisions about having children to address a problem of constitutional design would be a profound mismatch between instrument and objective.