Key findings about the religious composition

of India
BY STEPHANIE KRAMER
Indian Hindu devotees offer prayers on the banks of the Brahmaputra River in
Guwahati, India, on Nov. 13, 2018. (Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Religious pluralism has long been a core value in India, which has a large majority of
Hindus and smaller shares of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other
groups. In recent years, the size of these communities and their future growth have
been topics of great interest to the Indian public.
A new Pew Research Center report shows that India’s religious composition has been
fairly stable since the 1947 partition that divided the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-
majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. This study – the second in the Center’s
series about religion in India – covers the six decades between 1951, when the first post-
Partition census was conducted, and 2011, the date of the nation’s most recent census.
Here are some of the report’s key findings:

How we did this

India’s overall population more than tripled between 1951 and
2011, though growth rates have slowed since the 1990s. The total
number of Indians grew to 1.2 billion in the 2011 census from 361 million in the 1951
census. The number of Hindus grew to 966 million (from 304 million in 1951), Muslims
to 172 million (from 35 million), Christians to 28 million (from 8 million), Sikhs to 20.8
million (from 6.8 million), Buddhists to 8.4 million (from 2.7 million) and Jains to 4.5
million (from 1.7 million). India’s Parsis, a small minority, are unusual as their
population shrank by almost half, to 60,000 in 2011. Deaths among Parsis have
outnumbered births, due to the group’s relatively high median age and low fertility rate.

India’s overall population growth has slowed considerably, especially since the 1990s.
After adding the equivalent of nearly a quarter of its population every decade in the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the country’s growth rate dropped to 22% in the 1990s and to
18% in the most recent census decade. Growth among Hindus slowed from a high of
around 24% to about 17% in the 2000s, while Muslim growth slowed to around 25% and
the rate among Christians dropped to 16%.

Hindus make up 79.8% of India’s population and Muslims

account for 14.2%; Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains
account for most of the remaining 6%. Between 1951 and 2011, the share
of Muslims in India grew modestly, by about 4 percentage points, while the share of
Hindus declined by about 4 points. The shares of Indians in other religions held
relatively steady. Muslims are growing somewhat faster than other groups because they
tend to have more children.
Muslims in India have higher fertility rates than other groups,
but they also have experienced the sharpest decline in fertility
in recent decades. In 1992, the average Muslim woman had at least one more
child than the average Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh or Jain. By 2015, fertility rates
across all groups had fallen, with Muslims experiencing the most significant decline,
from an average of 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to an average of 2.6 in 2015. Hindu
women had an average of 3.3 children in 1992, a figure that fell to 2.1 by 2015. As a
result of these shifts, the fertility gap between Muslim and Hindu women in India
shrank from 1.1 to 0.5 children.
In India, fertility is closely tied to women’s education, and
Christian women are in school longer. Among women in their 40s, who
have generally completed both formal education and childbearing, Christians had an
average of seven years of schooling, according to 2015 data, compared with 4.2 years
among Hindus and 3.2 years among Muslims.

Each additional year of education correlates with a significant drop in fertility, according
to a multilevel analysis by Pew Research Center that accounts for education, wealth, age
and place of residence – all factors known to be associated with fertility. Strikingly, if
Christian women were similar to other Indian women in their 40s in all of these ways,
they would be predicted to have nearly a full child more than they actually do, on
average, and bigger families than Hindus, according to the analysis. This difference is
largely driven by the relatively high levels of education among Christian women in their
40s.

Migration has not greatly affected India’s religious

composition. In 2019, the United Nations estimated that about 17.5 million people
who were born in India resided elsewhere, and that there were 5.2 million foreign-born
people living in India, amounting to about 0.4% of India’s population that year. These
numbers are not large enough to have much impact on the religious composition of a
country of India’s size.

Unauthorized immigration is a controversial topic in India and nearly impossible to

accurately measure over time. According to some news reports, there are many millions
of people from Muslim-majority countries living in India without legal status or
documentation. But such high estimates have been put forth without supporting
evidence and appear to be implausible based on a lack of corresponding outflows from
origin countries and other indicators. Meanwhile, according to a 2012 Pew Research
Center estimate, Muslims and Christians were more likely than Hindus to leave India,
and about two-thirds of immigrants to India were Hindu.

Religious switching, or conversion, appears to be rare in

India. In the Center’s recent survey of nearly 30,000 Indian adults, very few said they
had switched religions since childhood. In fact, 99% of adults who were raised Hindu
are still Hindu. Among those raised as Muslims, 97% are still Muslim as adults, and 94%
of people raised Christian still identify as Christians. Furthermore, people who do switch
religions tend to cancel each other out. For example, among all Indian adults, 0.7% were
raised Hindu but no longer identify as such, and 0.8% were raised outside of the religion
and are now Hindu.

India is home to about 94% of the world’s Hindus. Along with

Nepal, it is one of only two Hindu-majority countries, according to
a 2015 Pew Research Center analysis. India is also home to one of the world’s largest
Muslim populations, surpassed only by Indonesia, which had 209 million Muslims in
2010. Pakistan’s Muslim population is roughly the same size as India’s. Bangladesh
follows in fourth place, with 134 million Muslims. (Modern-day Bangladesh was part of
Pakistan at the time of Partition but seceded in the 1970s.) Pakistan and Bangladesh are
both overwhelmingly Muslim, but the overall populations of these countries are much
smaller than India’s. Overall, India has the world’s second-largest population and is
expected to surpass China by 2030.

Hindus are the majority in 28 of India’s 35 states, including

the most populous ones: Uttar Pradesh (total population 200
million), Maharashtra (112 million) and Bihar (104
million). Muslims are a majority in the small western archipelago of Lakshadweep
(<100,000) and in Jammu and Kashmir (13 million), on the border with Pakistan. But
only 5% of Muslims live in these two places; 95% live in states where they are a religious
minority.

Christians form a majority of the populations of Nagaland (2 million), Mizoram (1

million) and Meghalaya (3 million) – all small, sparsely populated states in India’s
Northeastern panhandle bordering China, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal.
There is only one state in which a group other than Hindus, Muslims and Christians
form a majority – Punjab. About 16 million residents of Punjab identified as Sikh in the
2011 census, making this state home to most of the world’s Sikhs