Srinagar: The National Family Health Survey for 2019-21 shows there has been a sharp fall in the total fertility rate (TFR) - the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime - in J&K from 2.0 to 1.4, far below the national average of 2 since 2015-16, when the last such survey was conducted.
ETV Bharat spoke to Dr Saad Masooma Rizvi, a gynaecologist, in Lal Dad Hospital on these dismal figures. Talking about the reasons for lower fertility rate in Jammu and Kashmir as compared to other states of the country, Dr. Syed Masooma Rizvi says that there are many reasons behind it.
"The most important reasons are stress and getting married late." She said that "during the last few years, it has been seen that due to various reasons, most of the girls get married after crossing the threshold of marriage age. And they have lost the ability to have children. The correct age for pregnancy is 25 to 35 years. After that, the ability of women to have children is reduced and they also face many complications,"
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Elaborating further, she said, "not only late marriage of women leads to lack of fertility. To some extent, even late marriages of men are responsible for this." She also said that men are more capable of producing children up to 50 years of age than women. Dr Rizvi says that "this is a system of nature and if you want to change, then you have to face difficulties and worries."
She said that in the last 30 years in the Kashmir Valley, people are witnessing a significant change in living and eating habits. With the availability of luxury items, men as well as women stay away from physical exertion, while the trend of canned food, junk food, is also giving rise to such diseases which further lead to such ailments.
