New regional estimates of fertility in China and India

The most striking feature of low fertility is its divergence in the developing world. In these regions couples are going for one child and most of them are reluctant to have the second one. The main focus of the study will be to see the process and of emergence of low fertility pattern in Urban Bengal and its implications. Principle data sources will be National Family and Health Survey, Sample Registration System (SRS) and Census of India, 2011. Trends in these will be examined and differentials will be analyzed using logistic and cox proportional hazard regressions. On the whole about 8.4 percent of women remain childless till the end of the reproductive years. A large proportion of the women may remain so voluntarily. It is also seen that concentration of women with one child is high among women with higher standard of living, higher education, greater exposure to mass media, not working women and Hindu women. The preliminary results from hazard model indicates women with high educational level and subsequently starting first child bearing at higher ages and sex of the previous child with no child mortality experience in the past determines the transition to second or third order child.

The release of the sixth population census has provided us with the authoritative information needed to quantitatively analyze the characteristics and changes regarding fertility in China in 2010. The themes of this paper include the fertility levels, fertility pattern, and the influential factors of the changes in fertility. It is revealed that with the fertility levels decreasing, structural factors (e.g., age structure and marital status) are becoming the determinative ones at present and in the future. Although the age-specific marital fertility rate has resulted in an increase of general fertility rate by 9.61% from 2000 to 2010, the age structure and marital status are more and more important among factors which resulted in the changes in fertility level. In the aspect of fertility pattern, the interval between first marriage and first childbearing is enlarging, and the parity is becoming lower. The findings are important to develop an appropriate understanding of its demographics and to scientifically plan and adjust the population policy.

Fertility rates by single year of age of mothers are not available for India. Therefore, they have to be estimated from five year age groups using appropriate statistical method. The Sample Registration System (SRS) in India has published fertility rates by five-year age groups, 15-19 to 45-49 for the twenty large states and India from 2005 to 2009. A comparison of these rates with similar estimates by the United Nations (2010) indicates that the SRS data suffer from underestimation in early reproductive ages and overestimation in the older reproductive ages. The SRS five-year fertility rates, therefore, have to be adjusted first before embarking on the estimation of single year rates. Thus, the objectives of the paper are: (1) correct the five - year data on fertility rates; (2) develop single year age-specific fertility rates by using the Pearson Curve, Types I / III/ and other interpolation methods : Beers and Quadratic Spline; and (3) discuss the rationale and application of the selected Pearson Curve for projecting the number of births. The final outcome will be a set of adjusted single year fertility rates for the large states in India for each year, 2005 to 2009.

Numerous states in India now exhibit sub-replacement fertility. In consequence, as elsewhere in East Asia, one-child-families must be in evidence in India. Very little work has been done so far on identifying and examining one child families in India (cf Basu and Desai 2010).
In this paper, we examine data regarding planned fertility and fertility ideals in the National Family Health Survey [NFHS-III], 2005-06. We found that only about 3% of families are one child families, and that two-thirds of these one child families are one son families. However, a large proportion of never married women and men who are mostly below age 30 desire small families with only one child. Indeed, one in every six never married women and one in every seven never married men report a preference for a one child family, with most of not particular about sex of the child. We found a high correlation between ideal family size of one and one child family outcomes, which implies that once these surveyed never married women/men marry and enter the reproductive span, we may find a sizeable increase in the number of one child families. We suggest this could be a useful input into forecasting fertility in Indian states.

This paper applies a new approach to measure and monitor fertility transition at the district level in India. Fertility transition in the districts of India has been measured on the basis of a fertility transition index that takes into consideration the two dimensions of fertility transition - the dimension of birth planning and the dimension of birth limitation. Application of FTI to the data available from the Districts Level Household and Facility Survey 2007-08 suggests that India and its most of the States, Union Territories and districts continue to be in the middle stage of fertility transition. The paper emphasises the need of reinvigorating family planning efforts in te country and suggests that the fertility transition index developed in the paper may be used for evidene-based planning and programming for family plannng activities and for monitoring the implementation of these activities at district and below district level.

India provides a terrain ground for investigating the long-term dynamics of fertility change for several reasons. First, it has a unique history of early family planning activities that emerged during the 10960s. Second, it has recently witnessed a rapid economic expansion likely to accelerate the pace of demographic transformations and to reshape its geography. Finally, it is a highly heterogeneous country characterized by a complex sociocultural and religious geography compared to other large countries like China, Brazil or Russia. Using original subregional fertility levels, we will reconstruct fertility change over the last five decades in the country and examine their changing spatial and demographic patterns. In addition, we will also compare India’s pace of fertility decline with trends observed elsewhere in Asia.
This paper aims at probing India’s fertility trends from both internal and external perspectives in order to answer two main sets of questions: Is India’s fertility transition typical of Asia or has it proceeded at a slower pace than elsewhere? Have fertility trends been parallel within India over the last decades? Can we identify distinct regional trajectories? How far have the conditions of the onset of fertility decline in each region determined its course during the following decades?