Jains in India and Abroad

SR No.: 007601
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Prakash C Jain
Publisher: International Summer School for Jain Studies
Publication Year: 2011
Total Pages: 260
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 6 MB

Page 128

Jain, P.C. 2004; Lath 1991; Singhi 1991) to undertake social scientific studies of the Jain community. During the late 1980s, the Anthropological Survey of India's People of India Project did collect some descriptive data on about one hundred "Jain Communities" (sic) across India but they are sketchy and repetitive (Singh 1998). Nevertheless, it can fairly be stated that a great scope is there to conduct anthropological/sociological studies on various aspects of the Jain community. Some of these aspects are briefly discussed below.
Population Dynamics
Jain demography is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. To recapitulate, in modern times, the Jains have been a small religious community in India (Sharma 1976). Thus in 1881 when the first systematic census of India was taken, the total Jain population was enumerated at 1,221,896, that is, 0.48 per cent of the total Indian population. Two million more members were added to the community after the elapse of a century in 1981, and a million more in the next two decades. However, all through these years the Jains never constituted more than 0.50 percent of the total population of India.
During the decade of 1981-1991 the Jain population grew very slowly, that is at the rate of only 4.42 per cent compared to 23.17 per cent for the previous decade. The population growth rate however was high (26.0%) during 1991-2001 period giving the impression that the trend of slow growth rate had been reversed. Ironically there are no corroborating data in the 2001 census to this effect. On the contrary, the available data on the fertility behaviour of the Jains, namely the proportion of population in the 0-6 age-group clearly suggest that the community has low fertility rate vis-a-vis other major religious communities. How then to explain the sudden jump in consecutive decadal growth rate from 4.2% to 26.0%. As already explained in Chapter 3, the answer to this question given by demographers and sociologists suggests that the sudden jump occurred not due to change in fertility behaviour but because of "ethnic revivalism" among the Jains - resulting from a community-wide campaign during the 1990s to declare themselves as "Jains" and not Hindus in the 2001 census returns. A similar campaign was done for the 2011
census.
114 Jains in India and Abroad