Why India’s South Thinks It Has to Populate or Perish

This month, the veteran technocrat Chandrababu Naidu — chief minister of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh — told the state legislature that his government would pay women to have additional children. He and his counterparts in other southern states are desperate to escape the sheer weight of numbers in the country’s north.

Naidu promised women Rs25,000 ($265) if they had a third child, and also suggested extended maternity leave and a longer period of free education. But in India, as elsewhere in the world, such policies are likely to fail; when given a choice, women have children on their own schedules, and not those set by politicians.