changes in the labour market. This makes child care a bigger burden and creates an incentive to limit family size. But most Indian men do not seem to have noticed. “My husband sometimes washes his own plate,” says Kavitha Kannan, a farmer and mother of two from Tamil Nadu. In the past, as the old blessing suggests, another consideration motivated couples: a strong preference for boys. That helped to keep fertility higher, because couples would keep having children until they had a boy. But “boy preference” has fallen dramatically: the data show that many Indian parents are content with a girl. Third, even if education and family structures shape parents’ thinking, it is reinforced by culture. Having fewer children has become aspirational, and that is being shaped by changes in technology and access to information. A study has found that the spread of cable television to villages in the 2000s led to a fall in the number of pregnancies, which the author put down to soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families. It is possible that smartphones—which are becoming ubiquitous, even in poor villages—are having a similar compounding effect. There is as yet scant evidence that their spread has accelerated fertility’s fall. But it is likely that smartphones help disseminate cultural norms more rapidly. In Nagepur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, women say they see lots of videos that depict small families and discuss how hard it is for youngsters to find jobs. Mr Rajan likens low fertility to a “contagion”: “What happens in Kerala ends up in Bihar,” he says.
That all this is already leading to smaller families and paving the way for a contraction in population is beyond dispute. The only question is how far fertility will fall. Some demographers suggest that strong marriage and childbearing norms will act as a floor, sparing India a baby drought as severe as, say, South Korea’s. Others flip this on its head, arguing that it is remarkable that fertility has already fallen so low despite such norms. They speculate that in the coming decades more Indian women will opt out of marriage and childbearing altogether. Even if India does not become South Korea, the speed of its demographic transition will have far-reaching consequences. Most obviously, it will get old before it gets rich. In Kerala, where almost a fifth of the population is over 60, the government has just created a department for ageing. The state has the most comprehensive social-safety net in India but, even so, only 19.4% of the workforce belong to any kind of pension scheme (the national figure is 12%). Providing for the growing ranks of elderly Indians seems a remote prospect. Yet the decline of the extended family undermines the assumption that children will care for parents in their old age. In south India rich-world-style care homes are popping up. In rural places more basic forms of care for the elderly are appearing, centred around yoga and gossip. But families unable
to find or afford care, particularly for those with serious illnesses such as dementia, may be forced back together. Cases of elderly relatives abandoned at mass gatherings, such as the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage, are on the rise. The strains on family ties are exacerbated by another trend, a boom in internal migration. Southern states have long relied on labour from the North and East, particularly in hotels and restaurants. But the flows of migrants are increasing, to provide workers for factories and care homes, among other jobs. At the Athulya care facility in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, the staff are almost all young women from the state of Odisha. The pull of migration will see more elderly Indians left behind in the village. Some aggrieved parents are already taking to social media to castigate their absent children. A more rapid demographic transition means that the share of India’s population that is of working age could peak as soon as 2030. India’s workforce can continue to grow even as its population ages because many working-age people are under-employed. In the long run the economy will need to make better use of women in particular, says Mr Mishra of Axis Bank. Demographic concerns already infuse politics. Mr Modi’s BJP likes to stoke fears that Hindus (around 80% of the population) will be overrun by Muslims (around 15%). Although fertility among Muslims is indeed higher, it too is falling fast and the difference is mainly because Muslims are poorer. Nonetheless in February Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the RSS, a huge Hindu-nationalist social organisation, exhorted patriotic Indians to have three children to help with “population stabilisation”. Southern states, meanwhile, worry that Mr Modi will “punish” them for their lower birth rates by trimming their seats in parliament. There may also be tensions between internal migrants and their adoptive states. Most southern politicians realise that migrants boost the economy, but there is some griping about an influx of outsiders who do not speak the local language. It is easy to imagine the north-south divide becoming more fraught.
For now, expect politicians of all stripes to cast around for policies to promote baby-making, like Mr Naidu. Yet evidence from around the world suggests that exhortations and bungs will not work. Fertility seems to be driven by forces too powerful for states or religious leaders to control very easily. Mr Rajan points out that India’s fertility has been declining for 70 years. The odds of a sudden reversal are slim. ■ Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free weekly newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//briefing/2026/06/04/indias-population-will-soon-be- falling-probably-quite-fast
America’s Social Security trust fund is disappearing California is on the cusp of its “Becerra era” Welcome to Evanston, where woke never died The fading influence of America’s spy co-ordinator Meet the jailscraper Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him
America’s Social Security trust fund is disappearing Legislators have just six years to fix things June 4th 2026 AMERICA’S SOCIAL Security trust fund for the country’s elderly citizens is now more than old enough to be drawing a pension itself. When the programme launched in 1940, its future must have seemed assured. Lots of money went in and little came out: for each retired person drawing benefits, more than 150 workers were contributing to the fund, which invested in Treasury securities. Today, after years of demographic transformation—lower birth rates bringing fewer workers to the labour force, and longer lifespans for the fortunate recipients—the ratio of workers to recipients is less than three to one. In 2017 the reserves held in the trust fund peaked at $2.8trn. Since then,
the fund’s size has dropped by $400bn, with more money leaving it in payments to retirees than has entered it in the form of contributions. Outflows are accelerating, and some time around the end of the next presidential term, in late 2032 or early 2033, the fund will run dry. Washington has a little more than six years to find a remedy, which means that senators elected in November may still be serving their term when the fund runs out. If nothing is done, the immediate consequences for pensioners will be dire. Payments will drop by around 23%, and will slide further in the following decades. The gap between the fund’s revenue and payments last year is estimated to have been around $209bn, about 0.7% of GDP, a gap which would have to be covered by borrowing. The system has been in a similar position before, but that was then. Big amendments to Social Security have been secured in different political contexts: in 1965 Lyndon Johnson harnessed a supermajority in both houses of Congress to ram through changes that expanded the programme. He created America’s federal health-insurance schemes at the same time. In 1983, when the fund was months away from depletion, Democrats and Republicans inked an agreement that steadily increased the retirement age from 65 to 67 and broadened the tax base.
The changes required need not be drastic if they are made soon. Research published last year by Wendell Primus and Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution and Jack Smalligan of the Urban Institute suggests a series of fixes. They would raise payroll taxes fractionally, from 12.4% to 12.6%, and add some workers in local and state governments who do not currently pay into Social Security. At the same time, they suggest increasing retirement ages for better-paid workers from 67 to 70 and taxing their benefits more. But getting the policy right is not the problem. The politics of Social Security and partisanship are both far more thorny than they once were. “A bipartisan group of people could pencil it out and we’d have a reform done, but that’s completely different to the political calculus,” says Daniel Bunn, president of the Tax Foundation, a fiscal think-tank. Imagining a repeat of the aisle-crossing deal that fixed the system in 1983 is now extremely hard. Based on data from Voteview, a research project cataloguing every American congressional vote for almost the past century and a half, legislative polarisation has never been as high as it is today. What’s more, President Donald Trump has shifted the Republican Party’s position on Social Security, an area where the Democrats have tended to command more public trust. During the 2024 presidential campaign all