India’s religious mix stable since partition

India’s religious mix stable since partition

Subject – Governance

Context – India’s religious mix stable since Partition: Pew study

Concept –

• The religious composition of India’s population since Partition has remained largely stable, with both Hindus and Muslims, the two largest religious groups, showing not only a marked decline but also a convergence in fertility rates, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center, a non-profit based in Washington DC.
• The study, based on data sourced from India’s decennial census and the National Family Health Survey (NHFS), looked at the three main factors that are known to cause changes in religious composition of populations — fertility rate, migration, and conversions.
• With regard to fertility rates, the study found that Muslims, who had the highest rate, also had the sharpest decline in rates.
• A new study on the religious composition of India’s population since Partition said due to the “declining and converging fertility patterns” of Hindus and Muslims, there have been only marginal changes in the overall religious composition of the population since 1951, the year India conducted its first Census as an independent nation.
• From 1992 to 2015, the total fertility rates of Muslims declined from 4.4 to 2.6, while that of Hindus declined from 3.3 to 2.1, indicating that “the gaps in childbearing between India’s religious groups are much smaller than they used to be,”
• The average fertility rate in India today was 2.2, which was higher than the rates in economically advanced countries such as the U.S. (1.6), but much lower than what it was in 1992 (3.4) or 1951 (5.9).

Marked Slowdown –

• Although growth rates had declined for all of India’s major religious groups, the slowdown had been more pronounced among religious minorities, who outpaced Hindus in the earlier decades.
• 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.
• All the six major religious groups — Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains — have grown in absolute numbers. The sole exception to this trend are Parsis, whose number halved between 1951 and 2011, from 110,000 to 60,000.
• 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 the Sarnas (nearly 5 million adherents), followed by the Gond (1 million) and the Sari Dharma (5,10,000).
• Sex-selective abortions had 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”.

On Fertility –

• 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.

OnMigration –

• With regard to migration as a driver of change in the religious makeup, the study said since the 1950s, migration has had only a modest impact on India’s religious composition. More than 99% of people who live in India were also born in India, and migrants leaving India outnumber immigrants three-to-one, with “Muslims more likely than Hindus to leave India”, while “immigrants into India from Muslim-majority countries are disproportionately Hindu.
• Religious conversion has also had a negligible impact on India’s overall composition, with 98% of Indian adults still identifying with the religion in which they were raised.