A sudden and intense controversy has arisen in Kerala on the issue of relative number of children born to different communities there. A recently retired chief of Kerala police has stated in an interview that of all children born in the state in 2015, as many as 42 per cent were Muslim, even though the share of Muslims in the total population of the state, as counted in Census 2011, was only 26.6 per cent. The former police chief has been accused of misrepresenting facts and fomenting communal discord.

A detailed scrutiny of data though reveals numbers even more startling than the one put forth by the former state police chief. Vital statistics for the last several years show that the share of Muslims in the total live births recorded in the state has been rising rapidly at least since 2008. In that year, of all live births in the state, 36.3 per cent belonged to Muslim families. That proportion has been steadily rising and had reached 41.5 per cent in 2015. Meanwhile, the share of Hindu births in the total live births has declined from 45.0 to 42.9 per cent, and of Christian births from 17.6 to 15.5 per cent.

Some commentators have argued that this rise in the Muslim share may be because of improved registration of births among them. That only means that the number of 41.45 per cent of the live births in 2015 being Muslim is more reliable than the lower figure of 2008. But the figures of both 2015 and 2008 are very large in proportion to their share of only 26.56 per cent in the total state population.

The phenomenon of higher and rising share of Muslims in live births in Kerala has to be read with the higher and rising share of Muslims in the child (0-6 years) population of the state as counted in Census 2011 and 2001. In 2011, 36.74 per cent of the children in Kerala were Muslim; their share in 2001 was 31.08 per cent. Census 2011 also counted 14.4 children among every 100 Muslims as compared to only 8.93 among every 100 Hindus and 8.91 among every 100 Christians. The gap between the number of children per hundred of the population between Muslims and Hindus in 2011 was of 5.45 children; that gap was of 4.19 children in 2001. Thus, all parameters seem to confirm the trend of rising fertility amongst Muslims, and a large growth gap between Muslims and others.