One of the unusual characteristics of the fertility transition in India is that fertility rates have declined, even while women have their children quite young. This is quite different from how it is unfolding in Northern Europe, North America or East Asia, where women are getting married and having children much later, and having fewer children.
A good illustration of this, as I wrote about in my work on the changing ages of women at childbirth, is through a comparison of India and the United Kingdom. For reference, the Total Fertility Rate (the average number of children that a woman is expected to have in her lifetime) is around 1.49 in the UK, and around 1.88 in India.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, the majority of births every year in India and in the UK were to women in their twenties. This share began to decline in the UK, as the share of women in their thirties having children began to rise, and by the early 2000s, there was a switch - the majority of births every year in the UK were now to women in their thirties.
The share of women in their thirties in India having children has also been rising steadily, but the majority of births every year in India are still to women who are in their twenties. Women in their early thirties are projected to be the ones most likely to be having babies only towards the end of this century.
It's a shift that is still some distance, demographically speaking, but it often seems to me that pop culture and public conversation have borrowed the idiom far earlier than Indian data suggests. The data certainly suggests that for the majority of Indian women, their twenties are, more than anything else, a period of enormous responsibility and labour. It's not just that the global fertility conversation is disconnected from the Indian fertility story, it's also that the public conversation in India too often seems disconnected from our own demographic data.
