The Conception Crisis

The sperm count is down, and egg quality low. Men and women in India are struggling to conceive. While lifestyle issues do contribute to infertility, researchers are more worried about hormone-altering chemicals that surround us. THE WEEK investigates how these are impacting our reproductive health

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

Until about a decade ago, weekdays at the Agatsya Sperm Bank in Rajkot saw men, aged between 20 to 30 years, queue up outside the facility. A quick screening and the young, athletic, qualified, English-speaking men among them would be picked out. For, it would be certain that they would have sufficient volumes of “healthy swimmers”, enough to be transported to clinics across Gujarat for assisted reproduction. At the time, 70 per cent of the semen samples received were accepted and marked “ready for use”. But that was then, when the Indian sperm was healthy and in abundance.

Today, it is the opposite. “Now, 70 per cent of the samples we receive are rejected,” said Dr Yogesh Choksi, a microbiologist who started the facility in 1997. His is the oldest registered cryobank in Gujarat. “Even as the number of donors has, by and large, remained steady, the quality and volume of semen has fallen down sharply,” he said. When Choksi started the bank, he recalls that any given semen sample would range between 3.5ml and 4ml with a sperm count of 80-100 million per millilitre, which was considered normal at the time. That way, it was possible to fill five vials with a single semen sample. But now, “a single semen sample measures between 1ml and 1.5ml and the sperm count remains as low as 15-20mpm,” he said. “We barely get one full vial from a single sample.”

Shocking, right? But it is a reality that has been staring us in the face all along. And combined with a decline in testosterone levels in Indian men, it has consequently resulted in the rise in infertility cases.

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