Dose women empowerment influences fertility in India?

In Indian society women has secondary status, number of studies proved that the empowered women influence decision making process. Therefore the study tries to find out dose women empowerment influences fertility. The women empowerment encompass various dimensions, such as house hold decision making, mobility related decision making and economic decision making index. It helped to calculate women empowerment in different states. The result shows the effect of women empowerment on fertility in different states of India which gives an idea about how women autonomy and fertility varies with state to state.
Methodology: NFHS-3 collected information from a nationally representative sample of 109,041 households, 124,385 women age 15-49, among these 87925 ever-married women has been interviewed. The NFHS-3 sample covers 99 percent of India’s population living in all 29 states.
The composite indices prepared to calculate women empowerment and mass media awareness by using various indicators. Multivariate and bivariate indicators are used to find out the influence of women empowerment and fertility.
Findings: it has been observed that women empowerment and its dimensions vary with the state to state. Also it has been observed age group plays an important role in women empowerment with the increase in age women autonomy increases