CENTRAL VISTA

Vista redevelopment plan and asserted that it is not a “vanity project”, but a necessity.

He also said no design has been finalised for a new Prime Minister’s residence and only two projects -- the Parliament building and Central Vista Avenue -- are currently being executed at a cost of around ₹1,300 crore.

Hitting out at the Opposition, the Union housing and urban affairs minister said he has been noticing that a false narrative is being created over the central project and added that no heritage building will be “touched”.

“It is not a vanity project, and this is a project of necessity,” Puri asserted while addressing a press conference.

Most experts agree that the policy alone will not reverse China’s declining fertility, though it sends a symbolic message after decades of the onechild limit that was often brutally enforced by forced abortions and sterilisations.

“Most families have a preference for few children now -akin to the rest of Northeast Asia,” said Lauren Johnston, a China economics and demography researcher at SOAS University of London.

“By the time of the next census will there be many third children? Probably few.”

A third of Chinese are forecast to be elderly by 2050, heaping huge pressure on the state to provide pensions and healthcare.

Ye Liu, lecturer in international development at King’s College London, said the new policy was “unlikely to incentivise birth rates dramatically.”

“The government shifts the responsibility of ageing population to individual families without concrete financial and policy commitments.”