'Bengali Bhadralok will go extinct': Sanjeev Sanyal warns as urban Bengal birth rate drops to 1.2

Economist Sanjeev Sanyal has warned that India is heading into a prolonged demographic decline, citing data that shows birth rates in several parts of the country have already fallen below replacement levels. 

Speaking on a podcast with historian Hindol Sengupta, Sanyal pointed to alarming trends in West Bengal, where the fertility rate is already far below the national average. "Urban Bengal is 1.2," he said, referring to the number of children born per woman. "Large parts of southern India but also other parts of India, say for example our common state of West Bengal, are now somewhere in the 1.6 range which is in the range of where Japan etc are."

He warned that such low fertility levels, combined with migration trends, could drastically reshape the region's demographic structure. "The point I keep making is that at this rate the Bengali Bhadralok will go extinct. Because if you combine this birth rate and out migration from Kolkata to other states and other parts of the world the Bengali Bhadralok will go extinct. These are not... these are statistical points, it's not even an opinion."

Sanyal noted that India's overall fertility rate has now declined to 1.9 children per woman — below the replacement rate of 2.1 — and that this trend is being masked only by higher birth rates in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. "We are already not replacing ourselves. To the extent we are seeing any population growth — which is quite slow now, it's only 0.3% or something per year and it's falling — it is happening because we are living longer. So reproductively speaking we are no longer reproducing ourselves. The number of children peaked 10 to 15 years ago."

Sanyal explained that this trend had been evident two decades ago, but was often dismissed by global institutions like the UN. "I began talking about this demographic issue some almost 20 years ago making the point that this alarmist Malthusian thinking that the UN and others were pushing — that human population would keep growing past 2100, that it would like eternally keep rising — is wrong,” he said.

Drawing from his earlier work including “The End of Population Growth” and “The Predictions of a Rogue Demographer,” Sanyal pointed out that even without restrictive policies like China’s one-child rule, many advanced countries have seen sharp and lasting declines in fertility. "Even in countries with no one child policy — in Europe or Japan or South Korea — there have been massive declines in birth rates and fertility," he said. "In fact in South Korea, it's gone down to 0.6 now."

He cautioned that once birth rates fall, recovery is both slow and economically costly. "Even if they succeed in reversing this, the benefits...will not show up for another 25 years. You have to pull people out of the workforce to take care of those children. So ironically, not only is this very difficult to reverse — if you succeed in reversing, you will end up actually having a lot of pressure on your workforce and your resources."

Sanyal also said India remains one of the few countries where public health officials continue to encourage smaller families despite the demographic shift. "There's now a UN report that just came out which suggested that [fertility is down to] 1.9, but what is interesting in that report is — one of the reasons it has fallen is because the government and the medical professionals are still advising families to have fewer children, because of the presumption that population control is a good thing." He concluded, "Whereas in India we are already not replacing ourselves to the extent we are seeing any population growth. This is an obvious point and I am amazed that I have to debate it."