Role of religion in fertility and family planning among Muslims in India.

Abstract

Religion has a significant relevance in the demographic study of socio-economic groups. Religion prescribes a code of life refers to a system of beliefs attitudes and practices which individuals share in groups and through this orientation towards life and death religion is supposed to affect ones fertility behaviour. According to Westoff the religious affiliation of the couple connotes a system of values which can affect family via several routes: (a) directly by imposing sanctions on the practice of birth control or legitimizing the practice of less effective methods only or (b) indirectly by indoctrinating its members with a moral and social philosophy of marriage and family which emphasizes the virtues of reproduction . The study of demography of religious communities is all the more important and intriguing in case of India because of its religious heterogeneity and the fact that followers of different religions are living side by side. According to the 1991 census more than fourfifths of the population were Hindus (82 percent) 12 percent were Muslims a little above 2 percent were Christians 2 percent were Sikhs about 1 percent were Buddhists and about half percent were Jains. The rest consisted of Jews Parsis and others. In terms of decadal growth rate during 1981-91 Buddhists showed the highest rate (35.9 percent) Muslims recorded a growth rate of 32.8 per cent which is higher than the growth rate of 32.8 per cent which is higher than the growth rate observed for Hindus (22.8 percent). The Growth rate for Christians (16.9 percent) is considerably lower than that for Muslims and Hindus. Thus it is seen that religious differentials in growth rate were significant during the recent decade. (excerpt)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.