While China is rolling back its restrictions on the number of children a family may have, one of India’s largest states is toying with the idea of imposing a two-child-per-family limit.
AsiaNews reported that Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced last week that the state wants families to have only two children.
The new policy is included in legislation drafted by the State’s Law Commission. But rather than explicitly banning more than two children, the bill says that people with more than two kids would not be allowed to work in the public sector, obtain promotions, or benefit from welfare programs. It also stipulates that families of four or fewer members would receive additional economic benefits.
Parents with more than two children would also not be allowed to run in local elections, AsiaNews reported, pointing out the irony that most of the state legislators who would vote on the bill have more than two children.
Uttar Pradesh has a population of 220 million, but India’s birth rate, like China’s and many other nations’, is already dropping. The prospect of an impending demographic winter, with far fewer young, working people to support an aging population, is what has led China to abandon its longstanding one-child policy.
In Uttar Pradesh, the current fertility rate stands at 2.7 children, which is above the national average, but much lower than the 4.82 rate in 1992-1993.
