India is no longer facing the population problem that shaped its family-planning policy for decades. A new working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), 'The Ghost of Population Past', authored by Sanjeev Sanyal, Aakanksha Arora and Virat Singh, argues that fertility has fallen so far that population control should no longer be an objective of state policy.
The more useful comparison in the paper is with China, which spent decades restricting births and is now trying to reverse a demographic shift that has become deeply embedded. China's policy error offers India a warning about how difficult it can be to change course once low fertility becomes a social norm.
