Birth Interval trajectories under fertility transition in India, 1992-2021: Regional heterogeneity and time-fixed effect socio-demographic correlates

Sonam Priya, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi

Though fertility has declined from 3.4 in 1992-93 to 2.0 in 2019-21, the birth interval has only increased merely 0.9% over nearly three decades. The broader spatial outlines of India’s fertility are widely understood but the details of the birth interval trajectories remain unclear. Moreover, till now the predictors and implications of the median birth interval have been studied at a point in time but no study has been done on birth interval transition and identified the time and regional fixed effect correlates. This study utilizes all five National Family Health Survey (1992 to 2021) rounds dataset for the empirical analyses. We used de-normalized weights to adjust for different sample sizes across the various rounds of NFHS. The empirical strategy of the study includes descriptive lines, co-evolution plots, parity progression ratios, pooled OLS, and complementary log-log regression models. The findings reveal that despite the completion of the fertility transition, the progress in birth spacing is insignificant, and has rather reduced at higher birth orders. Although India has completed its mission of fertility transition, without improvement in the adequate spacing of births, the enhancement of the quality of birth outcomes is not possible.

Keywords: Family Planning and Contraception, Fertility, Big data, Data and Methods

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