A South Korean construction company is offering to pay $75,000 (approximately 62.28 lakh in Indian rupees) to its employees each time they have a baby in a bid to tackle the country’s poor birth rate, CNN reported.
As per reports, the Booyoung Group also announced that it would give cash payments totalling $5.25 million or ₹ 43,58,27,437 to employees who have given birth to 70 children since 2021. Both, male and female employees, will be eligible for the benefit, the company said.
“I hope we would get recognized as a company that contributes to encouraging births and worries about the country’s future,” Booyoung Group’s Chairman Lee Joong-keun told his employees adding that the offering is a “direct financial support” to employees to help ease the financial burden of raising children.
As per the report, Joong-keun further said that employees with three newborns will be given the option of getting $225,000 ( ₹ 1,86,78,318) in cash or rental housing if the government supplies land for the building.
The Booyoung Group’s initiative comes at a time when the country is recording dangerously low fertility rates. As per Statistics Korea, responsible for managing national statistics in South Korea, the country registered an average fertility rate of 0.78 in 2022, the world’s lowest. Relative to the previous year, the number of newborns declined from 260,600 to 249,000.
South Korea’s birth rate has been falling since 2015. The country’s average fertility rate is expected to drop to 0.65 in 2025 and 0.59 by 2026. Though authorities anticipate a gradual recovery in the birth rate to 1.08 by 2072, but this figure remains significantly below the 2.1 births per woman threshold required for population stability in the absence of immigration. South Korea’s total population is expected to fall from 51.75 million in 2024 to 36.22 million, a level not seen since 1977.
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Published: 11 Feb 2024, 05:08 PM IST