India's birth control measures resonate among its minority Muslims
Raizda Yahiya was one of seven siblings growing up in a conservative Muslim household in India, but her parents ensured she got proper education – a rarity in the Muslim community in those days – and her Masters's level education ensured that she could shape her family as she wanted.
Raizda - with only two children, a son and a daughter - is part of India’s changing Muslim community and has decided to have smaller families, believing that it will provide a better quality of life for her children.
"My son is married, and he has two children and my daughter is still unmarried. But going forward you never know, they might have even fewer children,” she said.
According to India’s last census figures from 2011, Muslims are the biggest minority group in the country, accounting for 13% of the population of 1.4 billion, the majority of whom are Hindu. The fertility rate of Muslims in India is the highest across all religions, standing at 2.3 currently, close to the replacement rate of 2.1. However, it has also seen the biggest decline compared to other religions over the last two decades.
Raizda said that traditionally Indian Muslim families tend to have bigger families because of deeply-ingrained religious beliefs regarding contraception and family planning.
"The majority of Muslims, especially the clerical types believe and propagate that these things (contraception and family planning) are forbidden by God and our God has said so, and that's why one should not practice any of them. But there is no such thing in the Koran," she said.
With India set to overtake China and become the world’s most populous nation this month, the shrinking of its Muslim families underlines the success of its decades-old population control programmes and signals demographic stability, experts said.
Some 200 kilometres (124 miles) away in Moradabad city, where almost 46% of the population is Muslim, families are embracing education and family planning to make the socio-economic leap.
Shahid Parvez, a 65-year-old handicraft exporter, said he had ensured that all three of his children received higher education, to not face the same deprivation that he did.
“The situation was such that if the family was large then we used to suffer on every front including education. There was a problem in the education of the elder two brothers, but we helped to ensure the education of those younger to us as we started a business of our own (to help our father),” he said.
Shahid’s elder son and daughter, Hannan and Muneeza, both have degrees in business administration while his younger son is a lawyer.
Hannan and Muneeza said having a small family is not only prudent in modern times where it costs so much more to bring up a child, but also is part of the family planning process, unlike past generations where having children has seen a cornerstone of marriage.
Muslim scholar and writer, Sheeba Aslam Fehmi, said education and modern interpretation of Islam were helping to usher in change.
“Earlier interpretations were so bad that it was, it was as a given thing - that whatever comes your way is kind of god's will. So it isn't like that anymore, we have been interpreting the tenets also in a modern way... and doesn't have any kind of guilt adopting family planning,” said Fehmi.
India's state governments had also introduced measures to moderate population growth. The most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, had proposed legislation aimed at discouraging couples from having more than two children. Under the proposal couples with more than two children would not be allowed to receive government benefits or subsidies and would be barred from applying for state government jobs.
Despite all that, India -- with a population of 1.4 billion -- is expected to overtake China as the most populous country in the world this month in April.
Reuters
