How most newspapers missed the real story behind the census data on religion
New Delhi: The Muslim population is going up while the population of Hindus is going down. This seems to be the message being spread by the bulk of news reports on the ‘population by religious community’ data released by the Census of India on August 25.
However, a deeper analysis of the data makes it clear that the population growth rates of both Muslims and Hindus are on the decline and that the two rates are beginning to converge over time.
The growth figures for the main religious communities in India over the decade ending 2011 show that the Hindu population increased by 16.8%, Muslim by 24.6%, Christian 15.5%, Sikh 8.4%, Buddhist 6.1% and Jain 5.4%. As of the 2011 census, 79.8% of Indians were Hindu.
The statistics for the previous decade (i.e. from the 2001 census) show that the Hindu population increased by 19.9% while the Muslim population increased by 29.5%. Simple arithmetic then dictates the decline in the growth rate for Muslims—4.9 percentage points— is greater than that for Hindus—3.1 percentage points—when compared to the last decade.
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