IMPACT OF RESIDENTIAL STATUS OF WOMEN ON FERTILITY

Relationship between migration and fertility is well established and implications of such relation for population policy in broader context to urbanization and modernization are an emerging concern among demographers and other population scientists. Reduction in total fertility rate from 3.39 in NFHS-1 to 2.68 in NFHS-III may be due to several direct or indirect impacts of socio-economic and demographic variables. Migration may be one of them which is supposed to play its role in affecting fertility. Among all the possible determinants affecting fertility, change of residential status of women must be one of the important factors with its significant role. In this paper, the impact of migration on fertility has been discussed based on the data of National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS) conducted in the country. Relationship between migration and fertility is studied by taking residential status of women as rural stayers, urban stayers, rural-urban migrants and urban-rural migrants. Different measures of fertility are used for this purpose. Poisson regression model is also utilized to study the effect of migration on fertility by controlling for the other socio-economic and demographic factors. A substantial support is found for this relationship and rural-urban migration has had a more effective role in reducing fertility to a great extent. Key words: Residential status, total fertility rate, parity progression ratio