It's a start. If we can build on it.

"Going on the back of a sustained family planning programme spanning decades, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children per woman, has declined further from 2.2 reported in 2015-16 to 2.0 at the all-India level, according to the latest Family Health Survey (NFHS) released by the Union Health Ministry," TIE. "The country has been aiming for a TFR of 2.1," said Prof K Srinath Reddy. "This means we will possibly still become the most populous country in the world -- it was expected somewhere between 2024-2028 -- but it will now be delayed. It essentially means that we need not worry about a very large population being a challenge to our development." States with the highest TFR are Bihar 3.0, Meghalaya 2.9, UP 2.4, Jharkhand 2.3 and Manipur 2.2. The good news is that "India now has 1,020 women for every 1,000 men, is not getting any younger, and no longer faces the threat of population explosion," wrote Roshan Kishore. "To be sure, NFHS is a sample survey, and whether these numbers apply to the larger population can only be said with certainty when the next national census is conducted." The ratio between women and men was equal in 2005-06, it went down to 991 women to 1,000 men in in 2015-16, and this is the first time that women outnumber men. "But campaigners say that numbers just don't add up and describe the government claim as 'absurd' and 'next to impossible'," BBC. If there is no discrimination against girls then the average ratio at birth should be 952 girls to 1,000 boys but the latest survey puts it at 929:1,000. The National Institution for Transforming India, or NITI Aayog, is the government think tank for public policy, wikipedia, replacing the old Planning Commission which was decommissioned in 2014, wikipedia. Roughly in keeping with TFR, "Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Meghalaya have emerged as the poorest states in India with over 50% of the population in Bihar classified as multi- dimensionally poor, as per NITI Aayog's Multidimensional Poverty Index," ET. The incidence of poverty in India fell from 37.2% in 2004-05  to 21.9% in 2011-12 - a fall of over 15% - but the absolute number of very poor has actually increased from 2011 to 2019, wrote Udit Misra. "As against pulling 140 million out of poverty between 2004 and 2011, India has seen more than 76 million fall back below the poverty line between 2012 and 2020," said Santosh Mehrotra. The reasons are demonetization in 2016, increasing unemployment and the slowdown in GDP growth from 8.2% in 2016-17 to 4.2% in 2019-20. Before the pandemic hit. Of the students studying MSc in Physics at Delhi University, "50 percent came from families where they were the first generation of college-goers; more than a quarter of them belonged to farming families and about 70 percent reported their family income as less than 5 lakh (Rs 500,000) a year", wrote Prof Shobhit Mahajan. "They, and obviously their parents, have high aspirations for their future." But there are no jobs. "Thus what we see is a huge pool of unemployed university graduates with unfufilled aspirations." Better not to let children go to college. "Around 1.1 lakh (110,000) schools in India are single-teacher entities, according to Unesco's '2021 State of the Report for India: No Teachers, No Class'," TOI. A little bit of good news amid so much gloom. Still, at least it's a start. Pray we can build on it.