New Delhi, July 29 -- Parents in China are being offered around $500 ( Rs.44,000) a year for each of their children under the age of three.

This initiative, announced on Monday, is part of the government's first nationwide subsidy, which is introduced with an objective of reducing the financial burden of raising children and encouraging more births in the world's second-largest economy.

Despite scrapping the controversial one-child policy nearly a decade ago, China's birth rate has continued to fall, the BBC reported.

The government hopes that these new handouts, which are expected to help around 20 million families with the cost of raising children, will reverse the trend of falling birth rates.

Before this nationwide rollout, severa...