“I want to give my child the best of everything,” says Karishma Shetty, a 35-year-old make-up professional in Mumbai. “And for me, that meant stopping at one.” Karishma's decision, once a rarity in Indian households that prized large families, is now quietly becoming a pattern.
From bustling cities to small towns, more and more Indian parents are making a conscious choice to have just one child. The reasons range from economic pressure and work-life imbalance to changing aspirations and evolving social norms. This shift is now being reflected in national data.
According to UNFPA’s 2025 State of World Population (SOWP) report, the real fertility crisis, "calls for a shift from panic over falling fertility to addressing unmet reproductive goals." As per the UNFPA, SOWP 2025 underlines that the real crisis is not underpopulation or overpopulation but having greater reproductive agency – a person’s ability to make free and informed choices about sex, contraception and starting a family.
Yet, experts whom THE WEEK spoke to, say that "men and women from educated upper middle classes are choosing to exercise their agency over childbearing more wisely than before."
Dr Sonal Kumta, senior consultant, obstetrician and gynaecologist at Fortis Hospital Mulund, says that she's been increasingly seeing couples who are going in for "late pregnancies and delayed childbearing. If they are counselled that it might hamper their ability to reproduce, they take it in a way that suggests that they'll give it a shot, but if it doesn't happen, no problem."
Jyoti Singh, a homemaker from Nagpur talks about her "unfulfilled desire to have two kids." She's currently settled down with a husband who works in real estate and an eight-year-old daughter. "I wanted to have two kids but then we simply delayed it thinking well do it later and that later never came. Also given that we began planning pregnancy late, some complications made a second pregnancy difficult," adds Singh.
The report, which includes a UNFPA-YouGov survey conducted across 14 countries, including India, challenges global narratives surrounding the ‘population explosion’ versus ‘population collapse’. Replacement-level fertility, commonly defined as 2.1 births per woman, is the rate at which a population size remains from one generation to the next.
But very importantly, the report stated that financial limitations were one of the biggest barriers to reproductive freedom. Nearly 4 in 10 people say financial limitations are stopping them from having the families they want. This also included other factors such as job insecurity (21%), housing constraints (22%), and the lack of reliable childcare (18%).
"It is a fact that the cost of raising children has skyrocketed—tuition fees, extracurriculars, health care, and childcare don’t come cheap. Add to that urban space constraints, lack of extended family support, and the mental load of parenting, and the decision to stick to one child becomes a practical one. We know so many who simply don't want to enter this race," adds Dr Kumta.
With fertility declining after 35, many couples who plan pregnancy in their later years, feel a single child is a good balance between family life and personal goals.
“In our parents’ generation, having three or four children was the norm. Now, the idea of a big family is not even on the table,” says Charu Khunwa, 31, an IT professional based in Bengaluru. “We’re both only children ourselves, and we turned out fine.”
Some are also blaming climate change and 'the despondency in today's times' for decisions to put parenthood on the back burner.
Countries like Japan, South Korea, and Italy are already grappling with the fallout of very low fertility rates—shrinking workforces, declining economic productivity, and 'ghost towns' in rural areas. India still has a young population, but the window for capitalising on its demographic dividend is narrowing.