Summary
Despite surpassing China as the world’s most populous country, parts of India are encouraging higher birth rates due to concerns over declining fertility and rapid aging.
Southern states like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, where fertility rates are below replacement levels, fear losing political representation and federal revenue after upcoming electoral boundary reforms.
India also faces challenges of an aging population with inadequate social infrastructure.
Experts call for policies promoting active aging, extended working years, and better use of India’s demographic dividend to address economic and social pressures.
Indeed this is a problem that basically all rapidly developing countries have/will/are facing. Japan is famously struggling with their aging demographic right now, China is coming in 10-20 years, Russia is gonna have a particularly nasty time in about 30 years, Italy quite a bad one in just a decade. Plenty of emerging economies like Egypt, Philippines, and Rwanda are likely having their booms right now. At the same time many western countries have benefited greatly from immigration smoothing out their age demographic brackets since immigrants tend younger.