Methods and sources

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Sources

SRS and NFHS are different instruments

The Sample Registration System is run by the Office of the Registrar General of India. It records births and deaths in a fixed sample of areas and produces annual estimates. NFHS-5 is a household survey carried out in 2019-21 that asks women about the children they have had, the children they want, marriage and contraception. Because they are collected differently and cover different years, their numbers do not match and are always labelled separately on this site.

What "wanted fertility" means

NFHS-5 reports a wanted fertility rate: how many children women would have on average if every birth were wanted. It is a survey measure built from women's own answers. It is not a count of childfree people.

The proxy-data caveat

No official Indian survey measures childfree by choice. Fertility, marriage age and contraception are context for that conversation, not a measure of it. The site never labels any of these numbers a childfree rate.

Rules we follow

  • Only values read directly from a cited source are used. Nothing is estimated or filled in.
  • If a source does not report a value for a state, that value is left out everywhere for that state.
  • NFHS-5 fact sheets publish one decimal; NFHS-5 state reports publish whole percents. Where a table mixes the two, it is marked "rounded in source".
  • The state series start in 2003 or 2004 (2014 for Telangana and Uttarakhand). Missing years in the official table are left out.
  • Jammu & Kashmir shows SRS values only. Goa shows NFHS-5 values only, because it is not in the SRS-based state table used here.

State-level NFHS-5 sources