Dr Christophe Guilmoto* at the French Institute of Pondicherry — who recently delivered a lecture in this theme in the capital — is one such demographer, who is attempting to explain this phenomenon at the district level as a part of a detailed South India Fertility Project. Southern and coastal districts in the country indeed are the regions in which the decline in fertility — defined as the number of children per woman — has been observed to be the sharpest since the 1980s.

Even if the 2001 Census numbers are not in, Guilmoto and Irudaya Rajan of the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvanathap-uram have worked out their own estimates using the provisional 0-6 years population and following the ‘reverse survival technique’ to work out district level fertility rates. At an all-India level, their estimate of the total fertility rate during 1994-2001 was 3.16, which lies between the comparable numbers of the Sample Registration Service (3.3) and Second National Family Health Survey (2.85).

These numbers in turn are used for mapping the spatial contours of fertility across various districts in India. The lowest and below replacement rates of fertility are found in the geographically contiguous areas of Kerala, Tamilnadu and south Karnataka.

The areas in which fertility is lower than 3 children per woman, however, covers the southern and coastal states, along with Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Tripura and Manipur. As fertility decline in these states has been rapid, the possibility is that these regions might reach replacement levels a few years from now.

On the other hand, the highest levels of fertility — districts in which the number of children per woman is higher than 5 — are found in the Hindi-speaking cow belt states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh or BIMARU. These regions indeed constitute the heart of darkness from a demographic perspective. But times also are a-changing: With the rhythms of fertility decline, these regions are increasingly appearing as islands in a sea of rapid demographic change in India.

What accounts for these contrasting patterns? The temptation obviously is to lapse into economic determinism. However, Dr Guilmoto resists that, as the level of economic development has been observed to be ‘mediocre’ in the southern districts of India in which fertility decline has been most pronounced. The focus of the SIFP project indeed is to research both endogenous factors like culture as well as the role of exogenous ones like government intervention in the form of family planning programmes.

The low fertility rates in Kerala and Tamilnadu thus have a lot to do with specific local factors, including levels of social and political mobilisation, status of women and the role of communities like the Syrian Christians in Kerala and Naidus in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu who may have played important roles in the diffusion of fertility experiences. In sharp contrast, there is limited diffusion to high fertility rural districts surrounding progressive areas like Delhi, Kanpur and Gwalior. The complexity of India’s fertility decline thus awaits detailed demographic research.

a) Guilmoto, CZ ‘A comparative view of fertility decline:India vs South India’, manuscript.

b) Guilmoto, CZ and S Irudaya Rajan, 2001 ‘Spatial patterns of fertility change in Indian districts’, Population and Development Review, 27, 4, 713-738. c) Guilmoto CZ and S Irudaya Rajan, 2002 ‘District level estimates of fertility from India’s 2001 Census’, Economic and Political Weekly, February 16, XXXVII, 7, 665-572.