Falling fertility rate: Is India in danger of missing its demographic dividend?

This is Infocus. The Hindus, current affairs, broadcast. Hello and welcome to Infocus, I'm G. Sampath. India is going through a demographic transition. The proportion of its working age population is increasing, which means India has a great window of opportunity to boost economic growth, which is also known as the demographic dividend. But thanks to years of poor governance, we are in danger of missing this narrowing window. In this episode, we unpack one question that could well determine India's economic future. Can we make a demographic dividend count, or will we as a nation grow old before we grow rich? Joining us today is well-known demographic doctor Apurwa Jhada, who is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Senior Fellow at the Population Reference Bureau, Washington, DC. Apurwa, welcome to Infocus. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Before we get into the actual subject demographic dividend as such, I wanted to ask you what made you choose demography as a subject, as a career to specialize in? Thank you for inviting me, Sampath. I love your podcast, so this is such a thrill. So demography may sound like a niche subject to many, but it's been around for generations. And honestly, growing up in Mumbai, that's where I spent my formative years. It was really impossible to avoid confronting the massive rapid demographic shifts that were taking place in front of your eyes. We're always a very curious kid, so I would always remember at a young age, I would ask my parents about what I saw as differences in gender roles between different families that we would visit or between our larger circle. You could see the stark inequalities in wealth and life outcomes, the confluence of caste and religion, and so many more things. And so I always wondered why and what are people doing about some of this? And demography was really the kind of study or the discipline that gave me the wings to interrogate it further. These are, of course, universal realities. India is no exception, but India provided me the fertile ground to delve into those questions during my doctorate work, as well as during my career at USAID, to seek some semblance of solutions. And in USAID, I was able to also compare across different countries, what's happening in India versus what's happening in other countries in South Asia or in South China, Africa, Latin America, etc. And so, you know, is a lot of that work done? Are all of those questions answered? Of course not, and that's what keeps me going. And gives me that motivation to continue asking those questions and delving into what's driving a lot of the different shifts we're seeing all around us and henceforth into the end of the century, as well. You're right, Devon, it's very interesting to hear you say that how you got interested in this subject when you were growing up in Bombay. That must have been like, today everybody is talking about demography also because one aspect of it, immigration has become a huge flashpoint politically all over the world. But you, I think, came to this domain much earlier. You calling me old? I suppose I should call myself old before I can do that. No, no, you're right. It was mostly with fertility. That was the push towards it where you saw it was not quite the population bomb, which was what in the 60s, there was this book that was wricking about the teaming population in India. It wasn't really that. It was just seeing that, you know, you see a crowded train, you see a crowded bus, and then you see the sort of juxtaposition of others that are choosing potentially to have one child or two children. So I was always interested in sort of the decision making between families and communities in terms of family formation, how many children to have that sort of thing. So there's three aspects to demography. There's fertility, there's mortality, and there's migration. And fertility was really the thing that got me going in the beginning. Right. Okay. That's really interesting. So that brings us directly into the topic we are sort of delving into in this episode. And I keep hearing all these terms which are thrown about, which we read about in the papers, you know, things like demographic transition, demographic dividend, and dependency ratio. And I've read some of your work and of course, all these things have a lot to do with mortality and fertility as we just mentioned. So can you just unpack for the benefit of her readers what exactly do these terms mean vis-a-vis the larger debates that we are facing today? Yeah, sure. So the way that I like to explain it to a non-demographic audience is if you think about it household, you know, imagine a multi-generational family where for a while mostly everyone is either a child or kind of an older person. So the earners that are there are stretched quite thin. They're caring for their aging parents. They're also taking care of their young children. And then you fast forward a generation later. Those children have then grown into earners themselves. And they don't yet have their own large families to support. And so for those years, the household has more income than mouths to feed. Right? And so what happens? The family saves more, invests in the next generation whether in terms of health, education, et cetera. And then it can also accumulate wealth. And that window, that sort of phenomenon is called the demographic dividend. It's important to note that the household didn't get richer because people worked harder. It got richer because that ratio of earners to dependents improved. And for a country, it's the same thing that happens. The demographic dividend is this potential economic growth that a country can enjoy as a result of its shifting age structure because of fertility and mortality. So essentially this age structure shifts because there's a set pattern. First, your death rates fall. That's mortality rates. Then a generation later, the fertility starts to fall. There's fewer births. And this two step is what demographers call the demographic transition. And in between those two falls, the country has this boom or temporary bulge in the working age population. And India is in that bulge right now. And the other term you mentioned, which was the dependency ratio, that's just the technical accounting of everything that's going on. It's the number of dependence, and which is usually defined as people under 15, people over 64, divided by the number of working age people times 100. And how do you interpret that? A higher ratio means that there's fewer working age individuals that are carrying the financial and sort of social responsibility of supporting more dependence. This can lead to increased tax burdens or a strain on public services. And a lower ratio suggests a much healthier economy where there is this large active workforce that can support a smaller dependent population. And India's dependency ratio actually peaked. So it was highest around 1971. It was about 80. And mostly the dependence there, as you can imagine, were children. And now it's 47 or around there, which is close to the bottom of the curve. And when that ratio bottoms out and then starts rising again, that's when your dividend phase is closing. To put it another way, the demographic dividend is a window, right? It's not an outcome. Sometimes people think of it as, you know, we got this, we got the demographic dividend. Our work is done. We're an economic superpower. It doesn't deliver growth. It delivers the conditions for growth. And so reaping that demographic dividend really depends on a conducive environment that prioritizes good health care, a quality education, decent employment opportunities, gender empowerment, and so much more. So what you do inside that window is what determines whether the dividend becomes a dividend or whether it becomes a disaster. Right. Thank you for that really beautiful explanation of these terms. You know, you said that demographic dividend is a window. It's not really some kind of a dividend dividend comes of an outcome. But we keep hearing about realizing this demographic dividend. And people are talking about measuring this demographic dividend. There was one recent research paper which says that at 2025 study that says India's demographic dividend was 1.9 percentage points during 1981 to 2001. But it collapsed due to COVID and the pandemic. So these are estimates happening around demographic dividend. How are they made and what do they mean? Yeah, I think the paper that you're referring to was a really, really interesting paper. It wasn't mine. So I'm hope I'll do a justice. But basically these are counterfactual exercises that help us understand what if, what if you choose to pull this lever versus another. And the question in here is how much faster did India grow because of its conducive age structure compared to a world in which the age structure stayed unchanged. And when you do this counterfactual exercise, there's two common approaches that you can do. There's one that's called the national transfer accounts. And it basically tracks how each age group earns, consumes, transfers, aggregates those flows in the future. to an arithmetic of who's contributing what at each point in the cycle. The second, which is in the paper that you mentioned, uses a panel regression. Basically, they take many countries over time, isolate the effect of age structure on growth after controlling for everything else. And the reason, I think, we won't get into the methodology that much, but why this was important is that 1.9 percentage points that you mentioned. And the reason it's important is because of the compounding effect. These sort of two percentage points a year over four decades is the difference between today's India and an India where the GDP per capita was something like 80% lower. That's massive. And then you mentioned COVID, so I think that's an important point. How this advantage collapsed during COVID. The favorable effect didn't vanish as in the age structure didn't change overnight. But what happened was that the realized contribution to the growth turned negative for those two years because, as we all saw, the economy contracted, people couldn't work, et cetera. And so the framing in the paper is that the dividend withered in 2021, it's not that it ended permanently. And the bigger worry that the paper underscores is that even before COVID, the contribution had peaked. And I think another important caveat to add here is that this aggregated growth contribution of 1.9 or 2 percentage points tells you nothing about who received those gains, right? And that's where I think demography, sociology, even anthropology is so important in terms of understanding some of that distribution. India's top 1% now holds about 40% of national wealth. SC workers earn 32% less than equally qualified forward cast peers, right? 71% of SC households are landless agricultural laborers. I can go on and on. Unless there is a more equitable distribution of this dividend, we may just see an intensification of inequality. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned the equitable distribution of this, whatever benefits we're getting from this demographic dividend. But coming to the larger picture of where India is right now, you say the dependency ratio is coming down, it's going to bottom out in a few years. So there are like different phases of this window, there's early phase, the middle phase and the late phase. So where exactly is India located right now? And how many years do we have before the window closes? It's a great question. So India right now, we're in the middle of the window. It's expected to last until about 2039, which is not that long. Our working age population, by the way, is going to peak between 2030 and 2040. And that's why the window, the demographic dividend window, really starts to close around 2051. And you know, this idea that fertility is declining, that, you know, we've been seeing. Also there are other indicators that are important to look at. The median age is 28 today, we're a young country. It's going to be 39 by the middle of the century and it'll climb towards 50 by the end of the century. And so what this means is that, you know, you look at the share of Indians right now that are above 60. It's about 11% right now. In the middle of the century, it'll be roughly 21%. And the sheer volume of number is something to contend with. And I think in short to answer your question, we have roughly 25 years. That's one generation before the conditions that made all of this possible begin to go away. And I think of where we are right now as a demographic version of someone's late 20s wearing your product in our productive peak, where at a moment where the body is most resilient, recovery is fastest and gains are compounding, right? And there's no biohacking our way to get a second late 20s. And so when the working-age share starts to shrink, it stays shrinking until the end of the century. And so you mentioned the paper that I wrote recently. In that paper, you know, I say that the risk is not that we are failing this window because the window is short. We are at risk of failing because India's policy and political bandwidth has not yet adjusted to the fact that the window is closing. And I think in many ways, the demographic window of opportunity is sometimes narrowly construed as this period of heightened economic output. But it's also a time to lay the fiscal and institutional groundwork for insured prosperity after the window closes. Everything's not going to collapse after 2051. Before that, we have to start acting now. And so as the dependency ratio bottoms out, which you mentioned, the questions have to start changing. They stop being about, how do you get people in the labor force? How do you educate our young people? Of course, that's important. But you also need to start thinking about how to take care of people leaving the labor force and aging. And we're not yet asking that second question, that set of questions quite seriously yet. Right. So what happens if India misses the demographic window? In your paper, in your other works, you've spoken about the examples of sub-Saharan Africa, of Latin America, which way, what happened in those countries, those regions as a result of the demographic transition, not being made the most of. And what lessons can India draw from those experiences? Yeah, all the contexts are so different, but they are quite instructive. I will add East Asia here because of the East Asia tigers that were famously studied for a while. There's some analysis that says that the demographic dividend contributed up to two percentage points per year in terms of East Asia's roughly 6% annual per capita growths between the 60s and 90s. So roughly one-third of that entire East Asian miracle came from this bonus of having more workers than dependence. And what they did is that they invested in their populations. They synchronized their fertility decline with massive investments in schooling, high quality education, and export-oriented manufacturing. Latin America, since you mentioned, is also really interesting. Latin America entered its window at roughly the same time as the East Asia example. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, they also life expectancy increase from 58 or so to 76 between 1960 and 2014. So in quite short time. And they also saw fertility fall from about 6 to 2 children per woman. That's really textbook demographic transition. I mentioned this earlier. But Latin America wasn't really able to capture the benefits of the dividend. What you want is to grow rich before you grow old. There's that adage, right? And in Latin America, what we saw is that they grew old before they got rich. And Brazil's per capita income peaked relative to the United States in the early 80s and has been falling ever since. So the middle income traps sort of closed before the dividend cashed out. Sub-Saharan Africa is actually in a completely different realm altogether. Fertility in most countries is still quite high. Jair, Chad, Somalia, they all have TFRs of five. And so the dividend window has not even opened. It's there in pre-transition phase. And even where that window has opened, the share of African youth that are not an employment, education or training has skyrocketed. And so the dividend can fall in two different ways. By not arriving because you have a stall in fertility or mortality rates don't fall. Or by arriving and then being squandered. That's the concern that frankly I have for many parts of India. And I would say that because India's risk profile sits closer to Latin America actually. And the parallel here goes deeper than the macroeconomics. It goes into the fact that Latin America missed its dividend because of structural inequality. Race, region, class, all hardened into intergenerational disadvantages that human capital investments couldn't easily reach. And India's structural inequality has a different name, but the mechanism is the same. Speaking of structural inequalities, I wanted to talk a little bit more about that, but also alongside the other inequalities in terms of the demographic changes itself. You have written about how different Indian states are going through this transition in a different rate. And there are different stages of this transition. There are these, you group them into three categories, the aging frontier, then the transitioning states and then they are the youthful ones. And as expected, you know the southern states are in the aging frontier. They are in a different stage, but they are all within the same country. So and policies get determined at different levels increasingly at the central level. Which may or may not suit what a particular state might want to do with regard to its demographic priorities. So does India have the policy bandwidth to accommodate these divergent priorities? Do you want to talk about that after sort of explaining this grouping and how you arrived at them? Sure. Yeah, I'm laughing because they're recently the NFHS-6 results. just came out and there's a lot of discussion about what those fact sheets mean and the North South divide. And what I keep saying is that we have to look beyond the North South. The states are moving in very different ways. There's actually three major buckets that I have categorized and the classification is really built on three indicators right together. It's the total fertility rate, it's the share of the population above 60 and where the state sits on its dependency ratio curve. So yeah, I call them their funny names, but aging frontier, transitioning middle and youthful engine. And the rationale, as you pointed out, is that a single national average obscures the fact that three different countries are inside India and that the North South divide is really not instructive anymore. Maharashtra and Goodrak are not in the same demographic moment. Wes Bengal and Asam are not in the same demographic moment. Caroline Bihar are not in the same demographic moment. The Caroline Bihar comparison is interesting because Caroline reached its replacement level in terms of fertility in 1988. Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, right? Bihar is project to reach that same level in 2041. That's when my nine-year-old kids will be in the labor force. So that's kind of astounding that 53-year gap between Caroline Bihar when it comes to when they're going to reach or when Bihar is going to reach replacement fertility that Caroline did much earlier. It's inside one country. There's one constitution. Vote in the same elections, yet there's this big divide, right? And so I think importantly what this tripartite classification lets us do is stop asking what should India do for its demographic dividend as if there's this one golden answer. There are three answers, right? The aging frontier states need to do different things compared to the other. So for instance, the aging frontier states they have to direct their fiscal resources toward aging-related needs, particularly geriatric and long-term care. Transitioning middle states have to double down on formalizing labor markets, increasing female labor force participation. And then your youthful engines, states must focus on sort of those foundational investments in health, vocational education, skills to ensure that their large youthful populations become productive before the onset of rapid aging. And you mentioned, won't these different states need to do different things? I hope that this kind of starts to answer what the different things could be, but there's more to dig into if you want to get into that. Right, let's look at the case of Andhra Pradesh for example. They've started offering cash incentives to families for having more children, ex amount of my 25,000 for the third child, fourth child, etc. Because apparently their population, fertility rate is below replacement rate, so they want to fix it. First of all, it's not going to help you address the cost of raising an extra child. It's just a temporary bandage, but is it a good idea at all for one state to take this kind of a step when you have the entire country's population and related demographic issues to be addressed? You know, the short answer from the global evidence for cash transfers, for incentivizing fertility, etc. is that they mostly shift the timing or like when people have children, they don't shift how many. I think that's something that's already been decided between couples, right? And so underprivileged, the scheme is actually symbolically very powerful, right? It's the same state that wrote a two-child rule into local body elections in 1994 when their TFR was about three children per woman. And then they scrapped it in 2024 when it was 1.5, which was one of the lowest in the country. But pronatalist cash transfers have a very thin track record anywhere that they've been implemented. And you know, to hone in on the Andhra Pradesh example, it's really interesting because in 2024, when there was that repealing of the rule that previously disqualified individuals from contesting local elections, if they had more than two children, but now the incentives are flipped, right? They're offering cash incentives for a third child and even a fourth. And the two-child rules in Punchite elections were studied after they were put in place. And the finding was consistent across states that adopted similar rules. They disproportionately disqualified SCST Muslim candidates from local office because at that time, those communities had much higher fertility at the time. And so the rule advertised itself as this population control measure in a way, but it functioned as a representation filter. And so reversing it 30 years later doesn't undo the political effect of three decades of who was kept out of Punchite. It's right. Anyway, the reason I'm skeptical, it'll move the needle, is that the international evidence is really consistent. Spain ran a similar scheme. They had a universal birth bonus and evaluation of that found again that the birds shifted earlier in time, but not more in total. Hungary spends about 5% of its GDP on family benefits. Yet it's TFR rose in very minuscule ways from 1.2 to 1.6 in 10 years. And it's actually fallen back down now. And so cohort completed fertility, which is the actual number of children women end up having, has barely moved. And I can say similar examples from Japan, South Korea, etc. And in other states, in India, Tamil Nadu is making similar statements. So last year, I believe the CM's urged newlyweds to immediately start having children. And it's tied to the delimitation question. Right. So it's not just an entrepreneur phenomenon. It's the southern states responds to the political math of being demographically successful. And so to answer your question, can it work in another state? I mean, mechanically, yes, states write their own policies. But again, the global evidence says cash doesn't actually bend fertility. What does work over decades is kind of access to housing, stable childcare, gender equal parental leave, predictable jobs, the things that really change the cost of becoming a parent, not the price of becoming a parent. Good. You know, on the one side, as you explained so well, that is the effectiveness of such measures. But on the other side, I want to ask you, is this the right impulse, politically or policy-wise, to want to get your fertility rate to grow up in response to this kind of situation where you find that your TFR is falling down? Is this the right move? When you know that there is a particular demographic transition, which you need to traverse in any case? I would say no. And it's funny, because ironically, women and women's bodies have always become the battleground for demographic shifts. Right? There's either the push to kind of limit birds, the antinatalist urge that we saw with forced sterilization in the 70s. And then you see this pronatalist push right now. Why is it that all our solutions tend to be sort of focused on women's bodies? You know, so I find that to be very alarming. But more importantly, if you think about it, say you give these incentives today, right? And you will have this shift in the timing of birds. Say you even have a spike in TFR a little bit in the total fertility rate. By the time these children are actually productive members of the society and are contributing to the economy, et cetera, you're still 25, 30 years out from that. So is that helping you right now? No. But you can do things that can help you right now, right? But it's just that some of those other solutions don't seem to have the political traction as the sort of ease with which to say that we should just increase fertility. Immigration in many other countries has become a hot hot debated topic, right? So if you look at say even a Japan, a South Korea, they're importing workers. And in parts of Europe that's seen similar kind of spikes in immigration for the care economy and whatnot, you're seeing an urge and a shift in politics towards the right. So there's a whole set of challenges associated with different solutions. But we don't seem to be even tackling those. It seems to be going straight to let's do something about the fertility rate without thinking about all the other things that could be worked on. Speaking of the demographic diversities or the diversions is within India, there are a few states which pop up, you know, Beha for example, I think its fertility rate is above replacement rate even now by some distance. And then so you talk about this dual lag in terms of survival and fertility, how the states which are the youthful engine, so to speak, are lagging behind the ones where you kept Kerala as a benchmark figure. So what exactly is this dual lag phenomenon that you talk about? And what does the state like Beha, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, what did they have to do? Because they've got this youthful cohort, it is opposite of the kind of situation, a state like Kerala or Andhra is facing. But they need to find things for these youth to do, you know, what is going to happen there? Yeah, so the dual lag is the concept that I introduce in a paper. It measures basically how far behind Kerala each Indian state is on two indicators, life expectancy, which is what that survival lag is, and total fertility rate, which is the fertility lag. And I chose Kerala because it's often touted as this demographic outlier since it reached these improved levels of development and women's literacy and health, etc. much earlier than other states. So it's 1973 survival threshold, which is the life expectancy of 62, and the 1988 fertility threshold of 2.1 fertility is the benchmarks that I use. And so, beyond, as I think I mentioned, already has a 53-year fertility lag. It's projected to reach 2.1 replacement fertility in about 2041. Maldipradesh, Shrajistan Orisha, they sit about 30 to 43 years behind those of the states that you mentioned. And the reason that this matters is that the dual lag is a measure of compressed time. Your youthful engine states are entering their demographic window right at the time when the national window is closing, right? And so they have one generation not to do what Kerala did over multiple. And so the compressed timeline is really an urgent policy challenge. What does that mean that these states need to do? There's a couple of things. They're not terribly unintuitive, which is the frustrating thing. These are things that we know need to happen, yet there seems to be a delay in sort of responding to them versus primary health. Bihar's child mortality rate is roughly about 27 per 1,000. And UP is similar. In closing that gap with Kerala, I believe will be the single highest leverage health investment available, and that can be done. The second is female literacy and secondary education. We know that Kerala's success was led by women's education. Bihar's female literacy is still hovering around 60% against a national of 70%. And research shows that every year of female schooling delays marriage by roughly half a year, which then translates downstream into better health for them, better health for their children, labor force participation, and so on. The third thing that I would say is vocational training and skills. I think this is really, really important. The youthful engine states have the bulk of India's school levers that are entering the labor market over the next 15 years. And national use unemployment is something currently around 10%. But for graduates it's closer to 30%. What's going on? This mismatch is structural, but it's also skill-based. And then the last bit is female labor force participation. Our female labor force participation is very low compared to neighboring countries as well as other countries at the same level of our economy. Why is female labor force participation so important, so critical for a country to realize it's demographic dividend? That's half your population. Right? So if you shut out or whether it's structurally or due to socio-cultural factors, if half your population is shut out or not achieving their own sort of potential, that's also depressing the potential of the entire country. So for example, if our labor force participation for women is about 40, and actually it increased most recently, but there's been a lot of research into what is this puzzle, what is this paradox, why are educated women remaining at home, etc. That can be a whole different conversation. But currently that little increase is driven by rural women that are returning to agricultural self-employment. So I don't think that's what labor market success really should look like or does look like, although that's what's happening. They don't have the stability of a formal employment and pensions and a lot of other important things that can accrue and accrue benefits over a lifetime. So I think for me that female labor force participation piece is really important. That's the fourth piece. And it matters to make sure that it's decent employment, not just sort of increasing numbers. It's more quality as well. Wait, I'm sorry to sort of dwell on this a little bit because this is a topic which I think about quite a bit. I mean I worry that in today's India there is some sort of an ideological resistance, a political resistance to a greater female labor force participation also because there is an expectation that women should do other things stay at home and be a support to the male head of the family. And you see there's a lot more in state like Haryana which already has sex ratio issues and so on, especially more in the northern belt and it is precisely those states which have a lot of ground to cover as you said in this compressed window if India has to realize this demographic difference. So this is not this is definitely a policy challenge but also it's a social challenge isn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that it's important to note that as we're seeing population aging that's going to take over whether you're in Haryana, whether you're in Kerala, whose burden is it going to be to take care of aging in-laws or aging parents? It's the women and so we're already seeing women remaining at home even if they are highly educated there at home and the burden of this unpaired unpaid care work falls on the women. So it's not just taking care of their own children, they're taking care of the many generations that make over side or reside nearby and that kind of compounds the challenge of labor force participation. But you're absolutely right and there's a lot of great sociologists that are studying this exact phenomenon. So Naldesai has done some great work to understand this puzzle when it comes to female labor force participation. Which is the most worrying statistic when you think of India's demographic future. I'm an eternal optimist but since you're pushing me on this, I think the most worrying statistic for me isn't one single number, it's really a divergence. And so take life expectancy for example, I never defined it but basically the measure reflects the overall health, wealth and stability and quality of life that are within a society, right? So it's a, it doesn't just measure how long individuals live, it kind of acts as a mirror for a nation's infrastructure and living standards. And so India's national life expectancy is at about 71 years. But when you further disaggregated, Naldesai's is about four or five years lower, Adalits is about three years lower and these gaps have not closed meaningfully in two decades. And so if the demographic dividend lands the way that wealth has again that sort of one percent holding 40% of the wealth, we will have grown the country without actually growing the country, you know? And so let me name three worries together. So first is the cast stratified mortality and life course gap that I mentioned. And you know, it's important to note with the numbers that I threw around with the life expectancy gap, the higher education gap and sort of the employment gap, these are not legacy statistics. This is what's happening right now. And so if you think about the demographic dividend as a clock, if the clock runs out before these gaps close, the country has aged before it's gotten fully rich, but also before the country has reached any semblance of equality within it. And second, I think when it comes to life expectancy, I tell this to my parents all the time, there's something about living longer. That's great, but living longer healthier is even better. So Indians can expect as I mentioned 71 years of life, but research has shown that only 63 of that is in good health. So your approximately your last decade in life is on average pretty poor health sometimes often with disability. And so you combine that with this 60 plus population of about 21% that I mentioned that it'll be by 2050. The math of who takes care of whom becomes one of the central policy problems of our of our lifetimes and to come back to your the last discussion that we had that care burden does fall disproportionately on women who are still being asked to provide it is unpaid family labor, right? I mentioned the female labor force participation question, so that's really worrying as well. And I think the last one because I'm feeling cheeky is more political than demographic. The temptation to treat fertility deferentials by religion or community as a national security threat rather than as a normal feature of demographic transition is something that I think about a lot. And you know you and I were discussing this high level committee on demographic change that's been set up recently. And it lists abnormal population shifts as religious at religious and social and community levels as something that they're investigating or that it's mandate. Listen every demographic transition produces differential fertility timing in the US you see this between black, white, Hispanic, Latino, Asian women and between communities as well. India's Hindu and Muslim TFRs have been falling for decades and they've been converging for about two decades. Muslim TFR and Hindu TFR are converging and they're both falling. It's the narrowest gap on record the gap is narrowing. And politicizing what is converging anyway is a policy distraction from the things that we actually need to do, right? And it crowds out the demographic conversation that we We should. be having by focusing on some of these issues that are not as salient, frankly. Right. I think this is a very important issue and a theme to be addressed, I think, in this course. I mean, weaponization of a particular demographic transitionary aspect, you know, along religious and community lines is actually a big policy distraction. It's also got other implications for the economy, for growth as well. That's another conversation. My last question, a full one. So, if we were to have this conversation, let us say in 2021, I think by then the demographic window would have closed more or less. By then, all Indian states would have reached sub-replacement of fertility. So, what indicators would tell you that India has successfully leveraged its demographic dividend and what indicators would tell you that the opportunity was missed? Yes. So, I guess in short, let me give you three indicators on each side. So, success looks like per capita GDP is, let's say, above 50,000 USD in current dollars, female labor force participation, which I've kept mentioning, let's say, above 60% and a healthy life expectancy gap below five years. That looks like a healthy, successful society. I think a missed opportunity then is the reverse of it. It looks like, you know, if your stuck at middle income status, your female labor force participation is low, still around 40%, and like concentrated in subsistence work, and a regional inequality wider than it is today. That's also institutionalized by a reapportionment. I think in short, it would be the long and short of it. So, what did you remember, held the life expectancy gap being less than five years? I didn't quite get that. Yeah. So, you know how I was saying how in India right now, your life expectancy can be 71, but your healthy life expectancy is something like 63. So, the gap right now is quite long if we were able to shrink that so that more of us are living longer, but also living those longer years in healthy, happy ways. It's called del or some dependency adjusted or disability adjusted disability adjusted life expectancy, but this is hail actually. We love acronyms. It's healthy adjusted life expectancy. And I think, you know, when we talk about India and Demography, back to you asked me why I'm interested in Demography right now, a lot of what people outside of India think of when they think of India, oh, it's the most populous country in the world, right? And yes, India's status as the world's most populous country is something to contend with, but it's kind of hollow if the potential benefit of having this large population, i.e. the demographic dividend is only going to be harvested by this narrow sliver of people. So, 25 years from now when we're talking about success, you know, the question won't be whether we had the window, right? We know we had it. The window was given to us by women, men, couples who had fewer children and they lived longer than their mothers, right? But the question really will be whether the dividend that they made possible was harvested by the whole country or by the part of it that always gets to harvest it first. That's a big question, I suppose, I can really sense your passion for the subject and it really was quite informative and also enriching talking to you, Apoorwa, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Sampat, thank you. If you liked it, do subscribe to Infocus by the Hindu on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Thank you for listening.