Muslim Population: What WhatsApp Forwards Won’t Tell You
Before reading, please check the video below. I know enough people that hold the views shown in the video. The people who hold these views are literate, urban and socially well-adjusted but unfortunately, they depend on WhatsApp for facts which is often false and has led to mob lynchings before. So, I’m posting a tutorial on how to verify and understand the facts about Muslim population by yourself.
To know the number of children an average woman of a particular religion has, you have to check ‘National Family Health Survey’ reports. It’s a large scale survey conducted by the Indian government to monitor basically the health of people. For convenience, here are the links NFHS (2005–06) & NFHS (2015–16). Click on the links, press Ctrl+F, and search for ‘TFR’. TFR is ‘Total Fertility Rate’, which is basically the number of children an average woman has in her lifetime. If you do so for both the links, you should see something like the pic below.
What you will find is, contrary to the common perception that Muslim women give birth to 3–5 children, the current average number of children per Muslim woman is 2.6. For perspective, that was the same birth rate Hindu women had just 10 years ago. More importantly, if calculate the drop in the TFR, the number of children an average Muslim woman has dropped more (23.5%) whereas in Hindus it has dropped by a little lesser (19%).
Once you have got the data, you may wonder — Average number of children per Muslim woman, although dropping, is still the highest. What should be done about that?
Do We Really Need To Curb Voting Rights To Control Population?
If you’re exposed only to WhatsApp forwards, the solution is to ‘curtail human rights’. Have you noticed the nature of these ‘solutions’ is often just being violent or destroy the dignity of a community? Does it not raise red flags for you? What does UN think about this? They have been working in the field of both Human Rights and Population Growth, might they have come across solutions that allow both birth control and a person’s dignity?
Let me guide your attention to an interesting bit of data from UN. Download the excel file and check for Bangladesh. It should look like this:
Data from India is also available for comparison. At one point, Bangladesh had an average of about 7 children per woman. In the same period, India had little lesser than 6 children per woman. After Bangladesh began a successful family planning initiative, which didn’t require anyone’s voting right to be revoked but just health workers visiting households twice monthly with birth control options. If that’s not impressive enough, check Iran (just below India in the table above). Their TFR is even lesser than Bangladesh.
There are other wonderful things these tables reveal but don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself. You have the data, you have the power to make your own opinions. Never let anyone feed you opinions, again.