spatial divisions and fertility in india在印度空间划分和生育能力.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Population Research Volume 2012, Article ID 235747, 6 pages doi:10.1155/2012/235747 Research Article Spatial Divisions and Fertility in India Vijayan Pillai and Mashooq Salehin School of Social Work, University of Texas at Arlington, 211 South Cooper Street, Arlington, TX 76019, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Vijayan Pillai, drpillai@ Received 27 November 2011; Revised 22 April 2012; Accepted 24 April 2012 Academic Editor: Syed Masud Ahmed Copyright © 2012 V. Pillai and M. Salehin. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Indian subcontinent can be divided into four geographical divisions. In this paper, we characterize three of the four divisions; the Northern Plains, the Deccan Plateau, and the Northern Mountains or the Himalayan as regions with dissimilar climatic and physical resources. It is argued that human adaptations to these variations would be varied by differences in social organization of production and consumption resulting in differences in fertility differences across the three divisions. We found significant differences in the median age at motherhood as well as in the total family size. The effects of the three selected fertility determinants, age at marriage, years of woman’s education, and level of child loss on family size also varied significantly across the three divisions. There is considerable homogeneity with respect to fertility levels within the zones considered in this study. 1. Introduction Using the 1991 Census and National Family Health Sur-