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The rich upper castes genrally limited thier reproduction because they wanted their children to inherit the land. The illiterate lower castes needed children because the children could be used as farm labor or even as sexual labor for the upper castes. That kind of thinking goes on even today. The Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar" gives a pretty good example of this, though they were talking about slavery in America. When a small educated group is outnumbered by a huge pool of uneducated people, the educated upper middle-class people try to flee if they can. Land becomes premium, jobs scare, infrastrucutre crumbles etc. India tends to double its population every thirty years, so by 2035 there should 2.4 billion people living there, 40% of whom will be completly illiterate and only a thin veneer of people with marketable skills. The same thing, though on a more muted scale, happens in this country. The lower classes have births rates of 3.5-5 children per woman. The upper class birth-rate is 1.84, less than replacement rate. This is why many parts of the country are slowly crumbling. More power, land, and money have to be ceded to the uneducated lower classes because of their sheer weight of numbers. It will be interesting to see how things will turn out here.

India’s population growth has dropped off. It is expected to peak at 1.5 billion in 2050 and then taper downwards. The average fertility per woman (number of kids per woman) has dropped from 6. something in 1991 to 3. something in 2001 and will drop further as of th census this year (2010).