Published Mar 06, 2026 | 3:13 PM ⚊ Updated Mar 06, 2026 | 3:13 PM
Chandrababu Naidu advocates population growth.
Synopsis: In a move aimed at increasing the TFR in the state, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu announced incentives for couples to have more children. Andhra Pradesh’s Total Fertility Rate at 1.5 — unchanged across six consecutive years, and 28 percent below the 2.1 replacement threshold.
In 1996, a condom display in Hyderabad, then the capital of the united Andhra Pradesh, caused a scandal. The then chief minister, N Chandrababu Naidu, put it there. He stood in front of the cameras and said what no politician in India wanted to say: Talk about AIDS, or the country will pay for the silence. People criticised him.
“In 1996–97, there was even an event in Hyderabad where condoms were displayed publicly to create awareness. At that time, I said clearly: break the silence and talk about AIDS, otherwise the country would face a major health crisis,” said current Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu in the state Assembly on 5 March 2026.
“At that time, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was around three. By the late 1990s, it came down to about 2.5, and by 2002 it fell to around 2.2. Those policies worked in reducing population growth.”
On 5 March, the same man stood in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly and announced what he called India’s first-of-its-kind Population Management Policy. Same instinct. Opposite problem. The number he wanted down is now too low, and he is reaching for the same kind of lever he reached for thirty years ago.
“Now we have to take 1.5 TFR to 2.1,” he told the Assembly. “The whole challenge is that the economy is growing. When the economy grows, there is a chance that children will automatically get the means to earn money. Because of this, many countries are in trouble.”
He is right about the number. The Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2023 confirms Andhra Pradesh’s Total Fertility Rate at 1.5 — unchanged across six consecutive years, and 28 percent below the 2.1 replacement threshold. Urban Andhra Pradesh has sunk to 1.3, a level at which a population loses nearly 40 percent of its population every generation.
The framing Naidu chose — “population care” over “population control” — is deliberate. For decades, population policy in India meant limiting births. Sterilisation incentives, two-child norms for local government candidates, and family planning targets driven hard from the top. Andhra Pradesh led that agenda. Now, Naidu proposes to run the same machinery in reverse, and he wants the distinction noted.
The five-pillar framework he announced — Matrutva for safe motherhood, Shakti for women’s empowerment, Naipunyam for skilling, Kshema for healthy ageing, and Sanjeevani for integrated public health — signals a lifecycle policy, not just a birth incentive. He also announced ₹25,000 for a third child, paternity leave, working women hostels, childcare centres, and curriculum reform.
Women do not stop at one child only because babies cost money. They stop because careers penalise absence, childcare does not exist at scale, and the infrastructure of daily life does not accommodate a second child alongside a working life. If Andhra Pradesh delivers the ecosystem it describes, it addresses something that cash alone cannot.
A strong and youthful population is the foundation of long-term prosperity. Andhra Pradesh will introduce India’s first-of-its-kind Population Management Policy, shifting the focus from population control to population care. With fertility declining sharply, we must act now to… pic.twitter.com/EJg4TWcoVh
— N Chandrababu Naidu (@ncbn) March 5, 2026
Naidu held up Israel as proof that a society can sustain a TFR above three. “Despite many challenges, it has maintained a Total Fertility Rate of around three and has managed to sustain its population growth,” he said. “This shows that demographic balance is possible with the right social and policy environment.”
What he did not say is where that number comes from. Israel’s national average is carried predominantly by its ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, which records TFRs above six, and by its Arab-Israeli population.
Secular Jewish Israelis — educated, urban, economically mobile — produce fertility rates closer to 2.0 to 2.2. That demographic is the one that resembles Andhra Pradesh’s educated urban population, which currently records a TFR of 1.3.
The lesson Israel actually offers is the opposite of what Naidu drew from it: A high national TFR can coexist with low fertility among precisely the population that policy incentives target. Cash and leave do not move the secular professional. They moved the community that was already having children.
South Korea has spent more per capita on fertility incentives than almost any country in the world. Its TFR in 2023 reached 0.72 — the lowest ever recorded for a functioning economy. Japan has run paternity leave schemes, child bonuses and nursery subsidies for two decades; its TFR: 1.2. Singapore’s baby bonus has existed since 2001; its TFR: 1.1.
None of these countries failed to spend money. They spent it into a decision that education, urbanisation and economic aspiration had already made.
Andhra Pradesh’s own data makes this point quietly. The TFR for graduate women in Andhra Pradesh is 1.2. For women with no formal education, it is 2.0. The ₹25,000 incentive reaches both equally. It is not clear whether it moves either.
The birth spacing data adds another note: Andhra Pradesh already records the highest share in India of second-and-higher-order births arriving within 10 to 12 months of the previous child — 3.3 percent. Couples who want a second child in Andhra Pradesh do not need financial encouragement. They rush it. Then they stop.
Naidu’s paternity leave — one month for a second child, another for a third — applies to government employees. The private sector, which employs the educated urban population driving the fertility collapse, sits entirely outside its reach.
“Today we are seeing a trend of ‘double income, no kids’,” Naidu said. “Families are becoming smaller, and micro-families are replacing the large joint families that once existed in India. Earlier, big families provided security and guidance. Elders would advise younger members, and families would move forward together. But now we are at risk of losing some of those values.”
He cited a Vijayawada incident — a dispute over television volume that ended in a death — as evidence of what happens inside families that shrink without building new ways to absorb conflict. He named the anxiety around delayed marriage and late childbirth with a specificity that most politicians avoid.
His most defensible proposal sits here: Reforming what young people learn before they make family decisions. “We are also considering including population awareness and related social issues as part of the education curriculum, particularly at the intermediate level,” he said.
If Andhra Pradesh’s fertility decline is driven by educated people making deliberate decisions about cost, career and comfort, then the response that might actually shift something is shaping the information environment in which young people form those decisions — not cash handed over at the maternity ward.
“Over the next four to five years, we will closely track the outcomes, monitor fertility trends and refine our strategies accordingly,” Naidu said.
This matters more than any specific proposal in the speech. The ₹25,000 incentive remains under examination. The paternity leave applies only to government employees. The curriculum reform requires institutional machinery that does not yet exist. The five-pillar framework has names but not yet budgets.
What Naidu has done is place South India’s demographic decline on the Assembly floor, name it as a policy emergency, and commit to measuring results. Andhra Pradesh’s urban TFR has fallen from 1.5 to 1.3 in five years. The four-to-five year monitoring window he promised is exactly the period in which that number will decide whether it stabilises or falls further.
The man who once broke the silence to stop people from having children has broken it again to start. Both times, he reached for a public stage and spoke when others would not. Whether the second act — more complex, more expensive, and running against a stronger current — works as well as the first is a question Andhra Pradesh will spend the next decade answering.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
