2026-06-05
23 分钟The Economist
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, why it's so hard to make decent vegan cheese,
and a tribute to that colossus of the saxophone, Sonny Rollins.
But first,
In the India of the 1950s, families were huge.
Parents might be one of six in their generation, grandparents might have 10 siblings.
Children were everywhere and overpopulation was an obsessive concern.
By the 1960s, slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them "two or three children, enough".
In the 1970s, things took a cruel turn.
Millions of young adults, usually the poor, were sterilized, many of them forcibly.
As recently as 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of the "unbridled population explosion happening in our midst".
Many new crises, he warned, created for our upcoming generations.
Things have taken a very sharp turn.
Upcoming generations are getting smaller and fast, and that is a warning to the world.
India's experiencing a baby bust.
In many parts of India, fertility has fallen really remarkably quickly
and much more quickly than people had anticipated.
Tom Sasse is our South Asia bureau chief.