Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After decades of overpopulation worries, the country now has the opposite concern. We examine India’s unusual demographic turn, and why it is a wider warning to the world. Vegan substitutes have broadly improved in recent years—so why is there no good vegan cheese? And remembering Sonny Rollins, an absolute colossus of the saxophone.
Watch extended clips from Insider here.
Guests and host:
- Tom Sasse, South Asia bureau chief
- Sam Colbert, senior series producer, Economist Podcasts
- Jon Fasman, senior culture correspondent
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- India, fertility rates, global population
- vegan cheese
- Sonny Rollins, jazz
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:09.6 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:12.7 | I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:19.1 | Today on the show, why it's so hard to make decent vegan cheese |
| 0:23.1 | and a tribute to that colossus of the saxophone, Sunny Rollins. |
| 0:33.5 | But first... |
| 0:48.3 | ... But first... In the India of the 1950s, families were huge. Parents might be one of six in their generation. |
| 0:51.3 | Grandparents might have ten siblings. |
| 0:53.3 | Children were everywhere, an overpopulation was an obsessive concern. |
| 0:58.0 | By the 1960s, slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them two or three children enough. |
| 1:06.0 | In the 1970s, things took a cruel turn. |
| 1:09.0 | Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized, many of them forcibly. |
| 1:15.6 | As recently as 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the unbridled population explosion happening in our midst. |
| 1:36.3 | Many new crises, he warned, created for our upcoming generations. Things have taken a very sharp turn. |
| 1:39.3 | Upcoming generations are getting smaller and fast. |
| 1:42.3 | And that is a warning to the world. |
| 1:46.2 | India's experiencing a baby bust. |
| 1:48.9 | In many parts of India, fertility has fallen really remarkably quickly |
| 1:54.4 | and much more quickly than people had anticipated. |
| 1:58.6 | Tom Sass is our South Asia Bureau Chief. |
| 2:01.4 | So if you look at the total fertility rate, a TFR, a measure of how many kids an average |
| 2:06.8 | woman has over her lifetime, it's now 1.9 for the whole of India and it's falling quickly. |
... |
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