The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : CENSUS FOLLIES

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Monday, Sep 13, 2004

Opinion

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CENSUS FOLLIES

FALSEHOODS AND TENDENTIOUS allegations are a dime a dozen in politics. It is hardly surprising that statistics — this time in the form of the First Report on Religion Data of Census 2001 — have become a weapon in the hands of political parties with a divisive agenda. Naturally, the Bharatiya Janata Party is not going to be mollified by the explanation that the growth of the Muslim population by 36 per cent over the last decade was the function of a gross methodological goof-up: Census 2001, unlike Census 1991, included Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir but the growth rates were released without making the adjustments every numerate undergraduate knows is elementary! The adjusted data (after leaving out Assam also since it was not part of the 1981 Census) show that the growth of the Muslim population has decelerated from 32.9 per cent during 1981-1991 to 29.3 per cent during 1991-2001. But communal formations will still point to the higher fertility rate of Indian Muslims and try and conjure up over-the-top scenarios of Hindus becoming a minority and Muslims the majority in India at some point in the future. Actually, demographers expect the population to stabilise soon and the proportion of Muslims in India to settle around 14 per cent as fertility rates for all groups are on the decline. Those who predict a Muslim-majority India in about another 100 years on the basis of the current growth rates of different groups fail to mention that in such a scenario, the country will have no standing space for its people.

At the centre of this debate is the salience and usefulness of religion as a key category for understanding demographic patterns. True, in the mass of census data there are other linkages such as those between female literacy and population growth. The data establish a negative relationship between an increase in female literacy and population growth for all religious groups. But the decision to release religion-wise data without taking into consideration other socio-economic parameters such as income disparities and social backwardness unwisely played into the hands of those who were waiting to make a tendentious use of data to serve disintegrative ends. Indeed the unseemly haste shown in releasing the religion-wise data is in contrast to the unexplained delay in providing access to data relating to age, distribution of workforce, and education levels (going beyond literacy). The release of religion-wise growth rates without making elementary adjustments for the exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1991 Census speaks poorly of the competence and professionalism of the Office of the Census Commissioner.

This also raises questions whether such key data-gathering institutions are beginning to lose their autonomy and whether they are being manipulated by vested interests. Another dubious aspect of this episode is the attempt to present the proportion of children in the 0 to 6 year age group in the population of different religious groups as a proxy for the fertility rate. Data on the child-woman ratio, a much better measure of the fertility rate, are readily available in the census. It makes little sense for the proportion of children in the population of religious groups to be culled out as an indicator of the fertility rate. Regional imbalances in development, rather than religion-specific causes, might hold greater explanatory value for demographic variations among different religious groups. Surely, religion is only one among several categories that can aid in the understanding of demographic patterns. By treating Hindus and Muslims as monolithic groups, the Office of the Census Commissioner has inexplicably sidelined fundamental socio-economic categories and factors that every demographer knows to be the key to a study of demographic patterns and change.

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