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By:

Rajendra Pandharpure

15 April 2025 at 7:55:54 pm

Congress Shakes Off Its Lethargy

Rahul Gandhi’s student outreach is giving the Congress a boost in western Maharashtra but converting street energy into electoral momentum will be the harder task. Pune: For a party that has spent much of the past dozen years looking politically exhausted, the Congress is finally showing signs of life. It appears that Rahul Gandhi’s Chhatron Ki Goonj (“Voice of Students”) campaign, which brought him to Pune has provided Maharashtra Congress workers with a much-needed sense of political...

Congress Shakes Off Its Lethargy

Rahul Gandhi’s student outreach is giving the Congress a boost in western Maharashtra but converting street energy into electoral momentum will be the harder task. Pune: For a party that has spent much of the past dozen years looking politically exhausted, the Congress is finally showing signs of life. It appears that Rahul Gandhi’s Chhatron Ki Goonj (“Voice of Students”) campaign, which brought him to Pune has provided Maharashtra Congress workers with a much-needed sense of political purpose. The Congress’s student wing had already been demanding an inquiry into the NEET examination controversy and the resignation of the Union education minister. After the lathi-charge on students on July 20, the party shifted into a more combative mode with Gandhi attempting to turn the episode into a broader political campaign. He staged a sit-in outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence and was removed by police. He subsequently appeared at press conferences alongside students injured during the protests and recently accompanied students wounded by pellet guns while filing an FIR with the Delhi Police. Politics of Confrontation By placing students at the centre of his campaign, Gandhi is seeking to reposition himself as a political interlocutor for younger Indians. The response at the Chhatron Ki Goonj gathering in Prayagraj suggested that the message had found an audience. Pune was the next stop. The August 22 gathering brought the campaign to western Maharashtra, a region where the Congress has traditionally had a substantial political footprint but where its organisational machinery has lost much of its old vitality. The event offered Gandhi an opportunity to reconnect with students and young voters while simultaneously energising a state unit that has often appeared trapped between organisational inertia and the dominance of its allies. The significance of the Pune event therefore extends beyond the size of the crowd. For much of the Congress’s recent history, that belief has been in short supply. A high-energy campaign centred on students, examinations, jobs and institutional accountability gives the party a simpler proposition to sell. There is also a wider political calculation. Western Maharashtra remains one of the most politically competitive regions in the state, shaped by the fortunes of the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party factions and the BJP. The Congress cannot afford to surrender the region to its rivals if it wants to rebuild itself in Maharashtra. Nor can it rely indefinitely on alliances to compensate for weak grassroots mobilisation. Gandhi’s intervention may thus be less about an immediate electoral breakthrough than about rebuilding political muscle. Student politics provides a useful entry point because grievances over examinations, recruitment and employment cut across caste and party affiliations. They also offer the Congress an issue on which it can attack the government without being trapped in the familiar ideological contests of Indian politics. But a crowd at a political event can only demonstrate mood; it cannot by itself produce votes. The real test for the Congress will be whether the energy generated by Chhatron Ki Goonj survives after the microphones are switched off. Can student mobilisation be converted into campus networks, local campaigns and eventually a durable cadre? Can the Maharashtra unit turn Mr Gandhi’s visibility into sustained activity in constituencies where the party has been eclipsed? Those are harder questions. The Congress’s challenge is to ensure that the goonj does not fade once the rally is over.

India’s Fertility Fault Line

As fertility falls below replacement level in several states, India faces a new demographic challenge: fewer workers, faster ageing and a growing economic cost of family formation.

India’s fertility rate has fallen to around replacement level nationally, but that headline conceals a far more consequential regional divide. Tamil Nadu’s total fertility rate is 1.7, Maharashtra’s 1.8, while Sikkim remains at 1.1 in NFHS-5. India’s fertility transition is no longer a single national story. It is producing states with very different problems, and some are beginning to worry about having too few young people rather than too many.


That is the context in which Andhra Pradesh is considering incentives for larger families. Sikkim has already experimented with financial and employment-related incentives for second and third children. Tamil Nadu has extended maternity leave for women government employees having a third child. Maharashtra presents another important case: fertility is low, but the state has not shifted towards an explicit pronatalist policy.


The question is why families are having fewer children, what that means for the future workforce, and whether governments are addressing the economic conditions behind fertility decisions.


Ageing Dividend

India’s demographic dividend was built on a favourable age structure. As fertility declined, the share of children fell and the proportion of working-age people increased. But this advantage will not last indefinitely.


The India Ageing Report 2023 estimates that people aged 60 and above accounted for 10.5 percent of India’s population in 2022. By 2050, that share is projected to reach 20.8 percent, with the elderly population rising to about 347 million. The population aged 80 and above is projected to increase by around 279 percent between 2022 and 2050.


Fewer children today eventually mean fewer young adults entering the labour market. At the same time, more people will require pensions, healthcare and long-term care.

This transition is already more advanced in several southern states. Tamil Nadu’s NFHS-6 profile shows that only 20.2 percent of its population is below 15, while 16.3 percent is aged 60 and above. Its fertility rate is 1.7.


The arithmetic is straightforward. A smaller younger population reduces some immediate spending on children, but it also narrows the future pool of workers. That is why population policy is increasingly becoming labour-market policy.


Governments can calculate a birth incentive in rupees. Households, however, calculate the much larger cost of raising a child in terms of housing, schooling, childcare, healthcare, transport, food and the income one parent may forego.


A couple does not decide whether to have a third child because the replacement fertility rate is 2.1. They decide based on whether their household can absorb another eighteen years of expenditure, care and responsibility.


For urban middle-class households, the cost is particularly visible. A second or third child may require a larger home, additional childcare and higher education expenditure. For women, there can be an additional cost: reduced employment or slower career progression. This makes fertility inseparable from women’s participation in the labour market.


Women’s Trade-off

The latest PLFS data show that India’s female labour-force participation rate for people aged 15 and above was 32.7 percent in June 2026, compared with 72.9 percent for men.


If childcare falls primarily on women, having another child can reduce the mother’s ability to remain in paid employment. A policy designed to increase births could therefore weaken female labour supply unless childcare and employment protections improve simultaneously.


This is where Tamil Nadu’s maternity leave decision becomes relevant. The state is reducing one cost of having a third child for women in government employment: the risk of losing income during maternity.


But most Indian women are not government employees. A serious fertility policy therefore has to move beyond maternity leave. Affordable childcare, maternity protection across employment categories, paternity leave, flexible work and easier return to employment after childbirth may matter more over the long term than a one-time cash payment.


Maharashtra’s case is useful because its fertility transition is occurring inside one of India’s largest and most economically productive state economies.


NFHS-6 puts Maharashtra’s total fertility rate at 1.8. Only 21.8 percent of its population is below 15, while 14.4 percent is aged 60 and above.


For a state such as Maharashtra, economic growth increasingly has to come from productivity, capital investment, technology, higher female employment, longer working lives and migration rather than simply from an expanding workforce.


That is an important distinction for the national debate. A state can have low fertility and still have strong economic growth. The question is whether that growth can be sustained as the age structure changes.


Care Economy

Ageing will also expose India’s weakness in social care. The elderly population will not only require pensions. It will require people to provide care.


The India Ageing Report notes that ageing is particularly difficult for women because they have lower lifetime earnings and greater exposure to widowhood and economic dependence. The growth of the oldest-old population will further increase demand for long-term and community-based care.


India’s traditional response has been to rely heavily on families. But that model becomes harder to sustain when families become smaller.


A household with one child has fewer potential caregivers than one with three children. But expecting children to substitute for pensions and public eldercare simply shifts the cost of ageing from the state to younger households.


That is not a sustainable demographic strategy. India needs a care economy that includes geriatric healthcare, home-based care, trained caregivers, community services and stronger old-age income security.


There is an economic opportunity here as well. Care is labour-intensive. A larger formal care sector could create employment at precisely the time some states begin facing shortages of younger workers.


Population policy also has an environmental cost. More people require more housing, water, energy, food and transport. But population alone does not determine environmental pressure. Consumption and urban form matter.

A larger population living in compact cities with efficient public transport, cleaner energy and better water management will have a different resource footprint from a smaller population living in sprawling, vehicle-dependent urban settlements.


This matters for Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra because fertility decline is occurring alongside urbanisation and industrialisation.


A government that encourages larger families must therefore also plan for the physical consequences of additional housing, schools, hospitals, water supply, electricity and transport. Otherwise, demographic policy is being designed separately from urban and environmental policy even though the outcomes are directly connected.


Migration Valve

India’s greatest demographic advantage may be that its states are ageing at different speeds. A state with a young population does not have to keep every worker within its borders. A worker from a high-fertility state can move to an ageing, economically stronger state where labour demand is greater.


Internal migration can therefore partially compensate for low fertility. But this requires a different approach to urban policy. Migrant workers need housing, healthcare, schools and social protection. Migrants are not simply labour inputs. They become residents, parents and taxpayers.


If Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh increasingly depend on migrant labour, their demographic policies will have to include migrant households as part of the population rather than treating them as temporary additions to the workforce.


If governments genuinely want people to have the number of children they prefer, the policy objective should be to reduce the economic penalty attached to family formation.


That means affordable childcare, good public education, accessible healthcare, housing, parental leave, stronger female employment and social security for older people.


India’s demographic transition has therefore produced a strange policy reversal. For much of the country’s modern history, governments worried about too many births. Some states are now worrying about too few. But the answer should not be a simple shift from population control to population expansion.


India needs different demographic strategies for different states. Younger states need jobs and human capital. Low-fertility states need productivity, migration and preparation for ageing. All states need stronger care systems.


The central question is not how many children a government wants its citizens to have. It is whether citizens can afford the children they want. India’s population debate now is no longer really about population but about the kind of society we will be able to sustain when the demographic dividend begins to fade.


(The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

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