Rising Infertility in India

According to the Directorate General of Health Services, the incidence of infertility in eligible couples is approximately 14 per cent-16 percent.

What is Total Fertility rate?

• Total fertility rate (TFR) in simple terms refers to the total number of children born or likely to be born to a woman in her lifetime if she were subject to the prevailing rate of age-specific fertility in the population.
• TFR of about 2.1 children per woman is called Replacement-level fertility. TFR lower than 2.1 children per woman — indicates that a generation is not producing enough children to replace itself, eventually leading to an outright reduction in population.

Types of Infertility:

• Primary infertility – where someone who's never conceived a child in the past has difficulty conceiving.
• Secondary infertility – where someone has had 1 or more pregnancies in the past, but is having difficulty conceiving again.

Health Issues Overburdening in India:

• As per the National Health Policy, 2017, public investment in health is expected to reach 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025.
• As per latest economic survey 2023-24, the Government Health Expenditure (GHE) for the last three years i.e. 2021-22, 2022-23 (RE) and 2023-24 (BE) is 1.9 per cent of GDP.
• The government told the House that the Department of Health and Family Welfare (DoHFW) has made efforts to increase allocation in the health budget.

Reasons for rising Infertility:

• Impact of Climate Change on Women and Children:
• Climatic changes may also spur shifts in fertility by decreasing children's health and survival, which may lead women to have additional children in anticipation of increased mortality risks (“insurance effects”) or in response to an actual child death.
• Rise in use of Intoxicants: Fertility is affected by unhealthy coping mechanisms such as tobacco and alcohol overuse.
• Contraceptives: Also, there has been a significant increase in current use of any modern contraceptive method. Contraceptive Prevalence Rate has increased substantially from 54% to 67% at the all-India level.
• Reversible Spacing: Introduction of new reversible spacing (gaps between children) methods , wage compensation systems to undergo sterilisation, and the promotion of small family norms also worked well over the years.

Challenges:

• Lack of Data: The Union Ministry of Women and Child Development has not conducted an audit regarding the impact of climate change on women and children.
• Declining Sex Ratio: India needs to give huge stress on declining sex ratios and the discrimination towards girls so that people don’t have a high number of children in the hope of having a boy.
• Concerns of Lower TFR: TFR lower than 2.1 children per woman — indicates that a generation is not producing enough children to replace itself, eventually leading to an outright reduction in population.
• Thus, TFR lower than 2 (as it is the case in urban areas in India) has its own set of problems. For example, Declining population.

Government Policies for Better health strategies:

• Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has already made regulations to ensure that cancer causing used cooking oil does not enter in the food chain.
• FSSAI has also launched Repurpose Used Cooking Oil (RUCO) initiative to enable the collection and conversion of UCO to biodiesel and/or soap.