Fewer kids, better parenting: Why rural Bengal couples are rethinking family size

Couples reconsidering having more children is now positively reflecting in the state's rural total fertility ratio

A few bricks haphazardly put together with tiles on top is what serves as home for Kalo Khan, who cannot recall his age but believes he is somewhere in his late thirties. Like many others in his village Khadinan in Howrah district, Kalo is a minor pisciculturist, making Rs 10,000-12,000 a month and, occasionally, a few extra bucks through the sale of fish scale.

Kalo lives with his wife Tumpa, a homemaker, their son Biswanath, the older of their two children, and daughter, a toddler. Biswanath studies in Class 7 at the local public school. Kalo wanted at least two more children, but then pointing at his modest surroundings, turns around and asks, “Do you see my condition? I am struggling to continue my son’s education. Next, I have a daughter to take care of.”

Countless other young couples like Kalo and Tumpa in rural Bengal are revisiting their choice to have more children. And that has begun to reflect in the state’s rural TFR, or total fertility ratio, which the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report, 2020, estimated to be 1.5, the second lowest in India, along with Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Kerala, and lower than the 1.7 recorded at the beginning of the survey in 2018.

The SRS survey is conducted by the Union home ministry to determine the demographic, fertility and mortality indicators in states. Only two states had rural TFRs lower than Bengal’s—Tamil Nadu and Delhi.

What is curious in rural Bengal’s case is that its fertility transition, or the move from a high fertility rate to a low rate—while mimicking that of advanced countries such as Norway, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium—comes despite poor socio-economic indices, low per capita income, low rates of female education and labour force participation, among other things.

What explains this paradox especially when the notion that more children means more earning hands has been a long-held one in rural parts of the country? What helped rural Bengal achieve what crores of public money spent on birth control advertisements could not?

This is what the Institute of Developmental Studies Kolkata (IDSK) set out to find, studying 405 families from 27 villages between November 2019 and March 2020, followed by regular field trips to multiple villages of the state till 2022. And this is what they reported. “These families are very clear about what they want—to breed less so that they can provide the best they can to their children,” says Kakoli Das, an associate professor of geography at the Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, who carried out this research.

Coupled with this aspiration to offer their children a better life, Das adds, “is also economic instability, which undoes the desire to multiply”. Das’s research has been presented and appreciated at the annual conference of the Population Association of America (PAA) 2024 and the Society for Population Studies, Newcastle University, in 2023.

The methodology
The researchers followed what is called the multi-stage hierarchical sampling design. It involved dividing the state’s 27 districts into three groups on the basis of predominance of rural population, absolute fertility decline between 2001 and 2011 and the rural poverty rate, as worse, moderate and better performers. One district was randomly selected from each of these groups—for instance, North Dinajpur was among the worst performers, Purba and Paschim Medinipur moderate performers, Howrah represented the better performers.

Demographically, the districts also covered the northern, central and southern parts of the state. A composite index of the percentage of female literacy, female workforce participation and proportion of non-SC/ST population was employed to select three blocks from each of the districts. Finally, three villages from each block were isolated based on their population size, and 15 households from each village further selected randomly. The women interviewed were in the child-bearing age group of 15-35 and were primarily asked if they would like to have more children in the future.

Bengal has historically led the way in fertility transition in India, since Independence at least. Records going back to 1947-48 show that 30 per cent of the women in Kolkata’s elite Ballygunge area were using some form of contraception. Then, in the seventies, Kolkata reached a TFR of two, the lowest among all districts of the country at that time. And when birth control campaigns raised awareness, that TFR fell even further. By the time the SRS started its research, in 2018, Bengal’s urban fertility stood at 1.3, a decline of 13.3 per cent from 1.5 in 2003-2005. But it was rural fertility that sprung a surprise, coming down by an astounding 32 per cent to 1.7 in 2016-18 from 2.5 in 2003-05.

In India, couples’ decision to have an additional child has also been dictated by the gender preferences. And the findings in this study hold that to still be true. Seventy-six per cent of the women who had just a daughter—95 cases—wanted to have another child hoping it would be a boy. But only 50 per cent of the women who had only one son—96 cases—wanted another child.

In cases where couples had two daughters (37 cases), 15 per cent were likely to want another child, but only 1 per cent of the 91 cases where at least one of the children was male, the figure dropped to 1 per cent, and to 0.7 per cent in the 44 cases where the couple had two sons. Eighty per cent of the mothers who had three children said the third pregnancy was accidental.

Forty-four of the respondents, who were mothers of single children, said they wanted fewer children that they could bring up well. More than 26 per cent thought the cost of childbearing and rearing was very high. For mothers of two children, 46 per cent said that the cost of parturition (delivery) and parenting was exorbitant and 27 per cent wanted to give their children a quality life.

However, women who based their parenting intentions on their own lived experiences were three times less likely to want another child than those who learned from societal influences and norms. The paper quotes Sujata, a 25-year-old mother of two children from North 24 Parganas, who said the sex of the child did not matter as long as the parents fulfilled their responsibility of providing them with a good life.

Based on these interviews, the research uncovered two primary motives underlying contemporary low fertility in rural West Bengal. “The first is reproductive responsibility,” it notes, “locally understood as an individual’s/couple’s moral, social, and economic accountability for fertility decisions. Parents feel responsible to make fertility decisions that do not create hardship or challenges for their children and seek to give children what is needed to make them healthy and secure, even if they limit fertility to a single child. The second motive is social aspiration, a longing to achieve a higher or more secure social status. In the context of rural West Bengal, people aspire to a high-quality life in which their children can escape poverty and achieve economic stability and upward social mobility. Parents consciously and strategically evaluate the impact of fertility decisions on the ability of children to attain personal fulfillment and wellbeing under prevailing socio-economic conditions.”

What does low TFR mean?
Discussing the effects of this unprecedented drop in rural fertility, Saswata Ghosh, Das’s supervisor and an associate professor of demography at IDSK, predicts it will lead to “several policy implications for rural Bengal in the near future”. According to Das, the change in the age structure (from a younger population to an older one), accompanied by changes in the family structure (from joint/extended to nuclear), the state’s rural elderly could become socio-economically vulnerable with respect to family care and well-being.

“Additionally, since the awareness as well as implications of various social security schemes designed for the elderly are poor in the state and the amount meagre, their economic vulnerability is likely to increase in the near future,” he adds. The elderly will thus be forced to remain engaged in the workforce out of financial compulsions, he argues.

According to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities-Ageing Report, 25 per cent of the rural elderly are in the workforce, a majority of them because of economic compulsion and engaged in unskilled, inferior, low-skilled and petty occupations. Government intervention by providing geriatric care at the primary healthcare level would be a challenge soon. Elderly widows are and would be the most vulnerable section of Bengal’s rural society in the near future because of their lack of bargaining power in the households and living arrangements.

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