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India proved that development is the best contraceptive. Now, we need to focus on adapting to the demographic destiny through careful planning.

We’ve made the right choices, the next step is fixing the pieces of the population puzzle.

There is often a gap between public posturing and private reality. This disconnect in the context of India’s population growth—a crucial element of its future development journey—is particularly striking. At the World Population Conference in 1974, India took a strong stance against Western emphasis on population control, with Dr Karan Singh, then a Union minister, famously stating, “development is the best contraceptive.” However, two years later, the same government initiated a coercive sterilization programme that contributed to the downfall of the Indira Gandhi government.

Since then, the population discourse has centered around a paternalistic approach to convincing “irrational” parents that their lives would be better with fewer children. Ironically, as socioeconomic development fuelled parental aspirations, and improvements in health cur-tailed child deaths, Indian parents quickly limited their families voluntarily. The first National Family Health Survey (NFHS) of 1992-93 reported the total fertility rate (TFR) as 3.4, a finding that was received with scepticism since prevailing wisdom expected it to be considerably higher. Since 1992-93, fertility has declined to the “hum do, humare do” mark (close to 2).

Given the success of the initial mission, why does population growth continue to occupy so much public attention? As India forges the next leg of its development path, with demography a key puzzle piece, three narratives deserve particular attention.

The first relates to India becoming the most populous nation on Earth and population size being seen as an obstacle to development. With an estimated 1.4 billion people, India has overtaken China. Despite fertility declining to replacement level, India’s population will continue to grow for some time due to large generations born in the past. It is expected to peak at around 1.7 billion in 2064 before declining.

Will this hamper economic growth? Should we encourage families to have a single child? China’s experiment with the one-child policy is enough to dissuade us. A sharp reduction in children born today would lead to very small cohorts of workers in three decades and increase the dependency burden.

A second, almost diametrically opposite, narrative argues about the economic growth that a large working age population can generate and that demographic dividend will only last for a limited time. The demographic dividend is a term used to characterize temporary benefits of fertility decline where a larger working-age population supports a relatively small number of children and elderly, generating economic surplus.

However, this is a temporary phenomenon, and could become counterproductive as these workers age. This has created an urgency to ensure we make the best use of our demographic dividend by investing in the skills of our workforce.

While we must invest in a skilled work-force, it is surprising that the discussion of demographic dividend ignores a vast pool of workers: India’s women. Women’s employment in India is low, and those who are employed are often limited to family farms and petty businesses like sewing or handicraft; barely 11% of Indian women are wage workers.

Hence, instead of worrying about the end of the demographic dividend, we should harvest the gender dividend by improving women’s participation in wage work, particularly since the fertility decline has reduced childcare responsibilities.

The third narrative centres around population distribution across states. Kerala was the first to reduce infant mortality, triggering fertility decline. Tamil Nadu and Goa were not far behind. Today, 30 states have a TFR below 2. However, the TFR in some of the populous states in the Hindi-speaking heart-land is still above 2, resulting in the redistribution of population share between the South and North.

Should a stronger population control policy be implemented to redress these imbalances? We argue that there is little need for it. Fertility has declined in all regions and for all groups. For example, the TFR in Uttar Pradesh, the state with the highest fertility in 1992-93, fell from 4.82 to 2.35 by 2019-21. Further fertility reduction can be achieved easily by expanding reproductive health services and education.

Inter-regional population distribution is linked to the distribution of political and economic resources. The allocation of parliamentary seats was frozen using population data from the 1971 Census, resulting in disparities in the number of constituents represented by each member of Parliament across states. Southern states fear that if this were to be recalibrated to equalize representation, they would lose seats and political power to the North. Moreover, since the Centre-state resource-sharing formula depends on population size, they may also suffer financial losses. As they see it, using population size for these allocations rewards states that performed poorly in reducing fertility.

These are legitimate concerns that can only be addressed by carefully crafted consensus. Political representation challenges can be addressed by allocating a fixed number of seats to each state in Rajya Sabha to ensure their interests are represented. In contrast, Lok Sabha seat allocation may depend on population size. Resource-sharing formulas may want to recognize that the future of the Indian workforce will come from the demographically lagging states.

Our estimates suggest that in 2021 in Bihar, there were 165 persons of working ages (15-64 years) to support 100 persons of dependent age groups, while Tamil Nadu had 248 working-age persons to support the same dependent population. This will flip in 2051, with the ratio changing to 229 in Bihar and 188 in Tamil Nadu.

Consequently, even as the demo-graphic dividend ends in southern states, it will continue to build in northern states, resulting in higher contribution to the economy. Should we not consider these future benefits and ensure that children in northern states are well-nourished and educated?

Over time, India’s population will age. In 2021, about 6% of the population consists of individuals above 65, which will increase to about 15% by 2051 and reach a high of 30% by the end of the century. This rising burden of an ageing population will require careful restructuring of our financial safety nets and health services to ensure that their sunset years are happy and healthy.

India can take pride in achieving a demographic transformation through the cumulation of voluntary choices made by millions of parents in their family’s best interests. We must now focus on adapting to our demographic destiny through careful planning and modulated narratives.

Sonalde Desai is a professor at the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Purushottam Kulkarni is a retired professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views are personal.

Sketching a reform agenda for the International Monetary Fund is easy; implementing reform is hard. It will require, among other things, the US to give up its veto in the institution, and China to assume more responsibility for global stability and the problems of other economies.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE – In July 1944, exactly 80 years ago, representatives of 44 countries met in an obscure New Hampshire village to negotiate the Bretton Woods Agreement establishing the International Monetary Fund. For many, reaching the ripe old age of 80 would be cause for celebration. For the IMF, the anniversary only highlights the urgency of reform.

Some necessary reforms are straightforward and widely agreed, raising the question of why they haven’t been adopted. First, the IMF should provide its members with regular annual allocations of its in-house financial instrument, special drawing rights. This would provide an alternative to the US dollar as a source of global liquidity while also addressing the problem of chronic global imbalances.

Second, the IMF needs to do better at organizing debt restructurings for low-income countries. Its latest attempt, the rather grandly named C ommon Framework for Debt Treatments, has fallen short. The Fund needs to push harder for cooperation from China’s government and financial institutions, which are unfamiliar with the responsibilities of a sovereign creditor. It should support reforms to speed up restructurings and endorse initiatives to crack down on holdout creditors.

In terms of its surveillance of countries’ policies, the IMF needs to address its perceived lack of evenhandedness; whereas emerging and developing countries are held to demanding standards, high-income countries like the United States are let off the hook. It needs to reinvigorate its analysis of the cross-border spillovers of large-country policies, a process the US has managed to squelch.

As for its lending policies, the IMF needs to decouple loan size from an anachronistic quota system and reduce the punitive interest rates charged middle-income countries.

To ensure the best possible leadership, the managing director should be selected through a competitive process, where candidates submit statements and sit for interviews, after which shareholding governments vote. The victor should be the most qualified individual and not just the most qualified European, as has historically been the case.

Most of all, the IMF must acknowledge that it can’t be everything for everyone. Under recent managing directors, it has broadened its agenda from its core mandate, preserving economic and financial stability, to encompass gender equity, climate change, and other nontraditional issues. These are not topics about which the IMF’s macroeconomists have expertise. The IMF’s own internal watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Office, has rightly warned that venturing into these areas can overstretch the Fund’s human and management resources.

Admittedly, the IMF can’t ignore climate change, since climate events affect economic and financial stability. Women’s education, labor force participation, and childcare arrangements belong on its agenda insofar as they have implications for economic growth and hence for debt sustainability. Fundamentally, however, gender-related policies and climate-change adaptation are economic-development issues. They require long- term investments. As such, they fall mainly within the bailiwick of the World Bank, the IMF’s sister institution across 19th Street in Washington.

An advantage of an agenda focused on the IMF’s core mandate is that national governments are more likely to give the Fund’s management and staff the freedom of action needed to move quickly in response to developments threatening economic and financial stability. The IMF lacks the independence of national central banks. Currently, decision-making is slow by the standards of financial crises, which move fast. Decisions must be approved by an executive board of political appointees who in turn answer to their governments.

But central-bank independence is viable only because central bankers have a narrow mandate focused on price stability, against which their actions can be judged. For a quarter-century, observers have a rgued that a more independent, fleet-footed IMF would be better. But the more the institution dilutes its agenda, the more such independence resembles a pipedream.

The other factor underpinning the viability of central-bank independence is that monetary policymakers at the national level are accountable to legitimate political actors, generally parliaments and ministers. The legitimacy of IMF accountability is more dubious, owing to the institution’s governance structure.

For antiquated reasons, the US – and only the US – possesses a veto over consequential IMF decisions. Europe is overrepresented in the institution, while China is underrepresented. Until these imbalances are corrected, the Fund’s governance will remain under a shadow. This not only makes the prospect of operational independence even more remote; it also stands in the way of virtually all meaningful reforms, including the straightforward changes listed above.

Sketching a reform agenda for the IMF is easy. Implementing it is hard. Real reform will require the US to give up its veto in the institution. It will require China to assume more responsibility for global stability and the problems of other economies. And it will require the US and China to work together. For two countries that haven’t shown much ability to cooperate in recent years, IMF reform would be a good place to start.

Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, is a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of many books, including In  Defense of Public Debt (Oxford University Press, 2021).