“The Baby Slump: The Fear of Plummeting Birth Rates Looms Over India”, Open the magazine, April 16, 2026
“IT WAS ALMOST a decade ago when Dr Bandana Pradhan Subba was pursuing a fellowship in reproductive medicine in Guwahati’s Institute of Human Reproduction, a well-known in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) centre in the city, that she began to notice the vast numbers of patients from her home state Sikkim doing the rounds of IVF clinics in the city. “It was very moving to see them so far away from home,” Dr Subba says. “Many had quit their jobs so they could stay for extended periods to continue with their IVF treatment. A lot of them were under pressure and their marriages were under stress because they were childless.”
These individuals had travelled all the way to Guwahati because Sikkim had no IVF centres, and even the infertility treatment provided in the nearby city of Siliguri in West Bengal, where most patients from Sikkim usually head to for medical care, was at a nascent stage. This experience would push Dr Subba to set up an infertility clinic in Sikkim’s capital Gangtok, Nobelstride Fertility and Diagnostic Centre, and expand it to offer IVF treatment in 2023.
This clinic, which continues to remain the only IVF centre in the state, is today at the forefront of one of the Sikkim government’s key measures to halt the rapidly declining birth rate in the state. Sikkim is producing far too few babies, fewer than anywhere else in the country. It has a frightfully low total fertility rate (TFR) of just 1.1 (the average number of children that a woman in the state can expect to bear in her lifetime), well below 2.1, the “replacement level” at which births balance deaths. The state government’s officials however point out that its own surveys show that the state’s TFR is even lower and hovering somewhere around 0.8…….”
Read full article at openthemagazine.com
