role of caste and religion in non comliance of family planing in india

The “social gradient to Indian population growth” - whereby people belonging to groups higher up the social ladder had better family planing outcomes than those belonging to groups further down - is essentially a Western construct; there has been very little investigation into whether, in developing countries also. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative strengths of economic and social status in determining the family planing status of persons in India. In other words, even after controlling for non-community factors, did the fact that Indians belonged to different social groups, encapsulating different degrees of social status, exercise a significant influence on the state of their family size? The existence of a social group effect would suggest that there was a “social gradient” to family planing outcomes in India. In investigating this, the paper addresses, in the Indian context, an issue which les at the heart of social epidemiology: estimating the relative strengths of individual and social factors in determining family planing outcomes.
Although a Hindu-Muslim differential in fertility has persisted in India, it is no more than one child, and even this gap is not likely to endure as fertility among Muslims declines with increasing levels of eduation and standards of living.