PANAJI: Goa’s total fertility rate (TFR) has decreased by 0.4 children per woman in the last five years, as per the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) 2019-20. The TFR stood at 1.3 children per woman as against the earlier 1.7.
Gynaecologist Dr Govind Kamat told TOI that the “fertility rate has decreased not only in Goa, but across the world as people are increasingly going in for planned pregnancies and choosing to have one or two children.”
For the same reasons, people are not opting for early pregnancies, he said. “Because of this (delayed pregnancy) they then get complications, which also leads to reduced fertility,” Dr Kamat added.
The survey, which collected information from 1,856 households, 2,030 women in the 15-49 age group and 313 men aged 15-54, also stated that Goa’s fertility rate is well below the “replacement level of fertility”.
The replacement level is the number of children needed to replace the parents, after accounting for fatalities, skewed sex ratio, infant mortality, etc. Below this level, population starts falling.
As per the NFHS-4 2015-16, Goa’s total fertility rate was 1.7 children per woman, well below the replacement level of fertility of 2.1 children.
“The greatest differentials in fertility are by religion and caste/tribe. At current fertility rates, Muslim women will have an average of 0.3 children less than Hindu women (A TFR of 1.2, compared with 1.5) and 0.2 children more than Christian women,” the NFHS-5 survey stated.
In Goa, the NFHS-5 field survey was conducted in both districts from August 30, 2019, to November 26, 2019, through a private entity.
Eighty-five percent of the pregnancies in the five years preceding the survey ended in live births and the remaining 15% were terminated in foetal wastage (abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth).
Miscarriage is the most commonly reported type of foetal wastage, accounting for 11% of all pregnancies, abortions accounted for 5%, NFHS-5 said.
As per the latest survey, the median age at first marriage is 24.2 years among women in the age group of 25-49 years, with 10% in the age group 20-24 years having married before the legal minimum age of 18. This figure is down slightly from 12% in the earlier survey.
Eight percent of the men in the age group 25-29 years got married before the legal minimum age of 21, up slightly from 7% in the earlier survey, the NFHS-5 stated.
The survey also revealed that the median interval between births in the five years before the survey in Goa is 39.3 months, two months shorter than in the earlier survey. Seven per cent of births take place within 18 months of the last birth and 20% occur within 24 months. Almost half (45%) of births occur within three years of the previous birth.
“Research shows that waiting at least three years between children reduces the risk of infant mortality,” the survey said.
