There is a rapid decline in the number of children born every year to educated mothers, which is directly related to the rising education of girls, reveals a new data from the 2011 Census released on Friday.
The average number of children born to nearly 340 million married woman has declined from 3.8 in 2001 and 4.3 in 1991 to 3.3 and the reason being the wide range between an illiterate mother and a well-educated one.
Mothers who were deprived of education in their life have remained illiterate and had 3.8 children on average. While mothers with a graduate degree or above had just 1.9 children.
The study was done by calculating the average number of children born to women in the age group 45-49 years, which is the end of their reproductive age and thus represents the total children they can have.
With the each passing year the rise in education level increasing, but at the same time school drop out rates are still unconscionably high among girls. An idea of this is gained from enrollment data for 2014-15 put out under the District Information System for Education (DISE), which shows that there were about 13 million girls enrolled in Class 1 but the number went down by 58% to 5.4 million in Class 12.
Census data revealed that mothers who have not studied beyond class 8 (middle school) have three children on an average, those who dropped out between middle and high school had 2.8 children and those who had studied between class 10 and graduation restricted their children to 2.3.
The finding of Census 2011 shows that that this decline in fertility is accelerating. The rates of decline between 1991 and 2001 were 14% for mothers who studied up to middle school but between 2001 and 2011 this decline was more at 18%. The same situation is for other educational levels.
According to experts,education of mothers plays a very role in acelerating dip in the average number of children born to them. Educated women will earn better income households and they will prefer getting married to more educated men. And this is going to help a lot putting a decline in the rates of fertility.
The 2011 Census data shows that there are many women in India who are yet untouched by the wider trend of having less children. The number of married women who are illiterate and are in child bearing age that is, 15-49 years are about 96 million. And there also are about 16 million married women in the same age group that have not studied beyond primary level.
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