Population growth rates have shrunk more for minorities: Pew report

Social Issues Population Issues

22-Sep-21

Context: India’s religious composition has largely remained same since first Census shows study by Pew Research Center.
Background

Religious pluralism has long been a core value in India, which has a large majority of Hindus and smaller shares of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other groups.
In recent years, the size of these communities and their future growth have been topics of great interest to the Indian public.
To find out this, survey by the Pew Research Centre using data from the Census and the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) was conducted.
The study, based on data sourced from India’s decennial census and the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), looked at the three main factors that are known to cause changes in religious composition of populations — fertility rate, migration, and conversions.

Key Findings

The study by Pew Research Center concluded that migration and religious conversion have had very little effect in altering India’s religious composition.
India is home to about 94% of the world’s Hindus. Along with Nepal, it is one of only two Hindu-majority countries.
Hindus are the majority in 28 of India’s 35 states, including the most populous ones: Uttar Pradesh (total population 200 million), Maharashtra (112 million) and Bihar (104 million).

In context of religious composition

India’s religious composition has been fairly stable since the 1947 partition that divided the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Between 1951 and 1961, the Muslim population expanded by 32.7%, 11 percentage points more than India’s overall rate of 21.6%.
But this gap has narrowed. From 2001 to 2011, the difference in growth between Muslims (24.7%) and Indians overall (17.7%) was 7 percentage points.
India’s Christian population grew at the slowest pace of the three largest groups in the most recent census decade — gaining 15.7% between 2001 and 2011, a far lower growth rate than the one recorded in the decade following Partition (29.0%).

In terms of absolute numbers, every major religion in India saw its numbers rise.

India’s overall population more than tripled between 1951 and 2011, though growth rates have slowed since the 1990s.
Currently, Hindus make up 79.8% of India’s population and Muslims account for 14.2%; Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains account for most of the remaining 6%.
In 2050, Hindus are projected to represent about 77 per cent of Indians, Muslims 18 per cent and Christians still 2 per cent. Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains all have fertility rates well below the national average and are, therefore, projected to shrink as a share of the population.
Interestingly, out of India’s total population of 1,200 million, about 8 million did not belong to any of the six major religious groups. Within this category, mostly comprising adivasi people, the largest grouping was of Sarnas (nearly 5 million adherents), followed by Gond (1 million) and Sari Dharma (5,10,000).

In context of fertility rate

Muslims in India have higher fertility rates than other groups, but they also have experienced the sharpest decline in fertility in recent decades.

The fertility rate has also declined among all religious groups.
Fertility rate among Muslims still remains the highest, but it has dropped sharply from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.6 children in 2015, according to data from India’s National Family Health Survey.
According to the 2015 data, the fertility rate among Muslims is only 0.5 points higher than that in Hindus (2.1). In 1992, the fertility rate among Muslim women was 1.1 points higher than in Hindus.

Key Reason

Observing that a preference for sons over daughters could play a role in overall fertility, the study noted that sex selective abortions have caused an estimated deficit of 20 million girls compared with what would naturally be expected between 1970 and 2017, and that “this practice is more common among Indian Hindus than among Muslims and Christians.”
In India, fertility is closely tied to women’s education, and Christian women are in school longer.
The study noted that women in central India tended to have more children, with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh showing a total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.4 and 2.7 respectively, in contrast to a TFR of 1.7 and 1.6 in Tamil Nadu and Kerala respectively.

In context of Migration and conversion

The study also concluded that migration and religious conversion have had very little effect in altering India’s religious composition.
These two factors along with fertility rate are the three main reasons which cause religious groups to shrink or expand, Pew Research Center said.
The study found that 98% of Indian adults still identify with the religion in which they were raised, thus showing the lack of impact of conversions on the religious composition.
Meanwhile, more than 99% of people who live in India were also born in India, the study found. This data showed that migration too has hardly had any impact.
In fact, the study found out that migrants leaving India outnumber immigrants three-to-one, and that religious minorities were more likely to leave than Hindus.

Conclusion