"Baljit Rai, a retired police officer who was a personal witness to India's failure in containing the rising tide of illegal immigration from Bangladesh, refutes this argument by pointing to the birth rate among Kerala Muslims, who have a high level of education and a relatively high standard of living. Mani Shankar Aiyar had claimed on the basis of statewise figures for the southern states that "Muslim birth rates in all these enlightened states are very much lower than Hindu birth rates in unenlightened states like Uttar Pradesh". However, Rai's closer analysis of the figures shows that the Kerala Muslims have a higher birth-rate than the national Hindu average and even than the Hindu average in poor and backward states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan: the population growth (+28.74% for 1981-91) in the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram (with female literacy at 75.22%, far higher than among Hindus in the Hindi belt) is more than twice as high as the average for Kerala (+13.98), and well above the Hindu national average (+23.50). A secularist journalist confirms: "In spite of this 'near total literacy' the population growth rate of Muslims who constitute one-fourth of Kerala's population is as high as 2.3 per cent per year, which is more than even the national PGR [= population growth rate] of 2.11 per annum and is almost double the PGR of Hindus in Kerala itself.""
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Baljit Rai cited in Elst K The Demographic Siege (1997)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Kerala
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Demographics of Kerala
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