Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility
6/5/202624 min
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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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJason Palmer· Host0:00
[upbeat music] The Economist. [upbeat music] Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. [upbeat music] Today on the show, why it's so hard to make decent vegan cheese, and a tribute to that colossus of the saxophone, Sonny Rollins. [upbeat music] But first... [upbeat music] In the India of the 1950s, families were huge. Parents might be one of six in their generation. Grandparents might have 10 siblings. Children were everywhere, and overpopulation was an obsessive concern. By the 1960s, slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them, "Two or three children enough." In the 1970s, things took a cruel turn. Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized, many of them forcibly. As recently as 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the unbridled population explosion happening in our midst.
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