Educating girls for 12 yrs can reduce India's population spiral: Here's how

If a girl in India studies for 12 years or more–till the age of 18–she is less likely to have teenage pregnancy, less likely to have shorter interval between children and less likely to have more than two children during her lifetime, according to the latest national health data.

A woman with 12 years or more of education has her first child at the median age of 24.7, which is 3.7 years more than the median age of first pregnancy (21) for women between 25-49 years, according to the National Family Health Survey, 2015-16 (NFHS-4) report.

A woman with no schooling has her first child at 20.

Almost one-third or 33.6% of India’s population is born of adolescent pregnancies; delaying the onset of child bearing could reduce India’s projected 2050 population of 1.7 billion by more than a quarter, IndiaSpend reported on January 12, 2018.
If a woman studies for 12 years or more, she has an average of 2.01 children, compared to 2.2 for all women and 3.82 for women with no education, based on the mean number of children born to women aged 45-49–a period that marks the end of a woman’s fertility.
“Postponing first births and extending the interval between births have played a role in reducing fertility in many countries,” said the NFHS-4 report.