Protected couples are those whose pregnancy risks are effectively protected by government family planning.
Since social and economic factors, including those mentioned above, are mutually and complexly related to one another, it can be misleading to make conclusions on the basis of simple correlation coefficients alone. Therefore, we applied statistical processing, and replaced the data with regression equations to calculate standard partial regression coefficients. The result obtained shows that the overwhelmingly influential variable is the employee-ratio, and that significant but much weaker variables are the rates of female literacy and protected couples.
To sum up, the regions leading the decline in fertility rates in India have high rates of wage workers, including non-agricultural/forestry workers and landless agricultural workers in the rural areas. In other words fertility decline is slower in the regions with relatively many traditional farmers owning lands. In view of the regional variations, it is observable that the modernization of employment relationships mainly in the rural areas is the basic driving force toward the declining birth rates. Although it is true that educational investment to improved female literacy and government family planning have lowered the birth rates to some extent, it can be considered that the prerequisite for success is that the benefit of small families is recognized among the general public as the result of the modernization of employment relationships.
