Indirect Estimation of Selected Measures of Fertility and Marital Fertility from Information on CWR (0-9): An Application to India /States /Districts

Abstract

Fertility is one of the important components of population change, the other two being mortality and migration. When vital statistical data on number of births is readily available it is estimated directly using various direct measures of fertility such as the crude birth rate (CBR). When the information on number of births is not directly available, fertility is measured using the census information on child woman ratios (CWR) of various types. CWR has several limitations, but gained importance with the attempts made by Rele in 1963, and followed by several other researchers such as Hauer and his co-authors in 2013 deriving TFR from it. In the present study yet another attempt is made to use CWRs to derive not only TFR but also other summary indicators such as the TMFR. A set of simple mathematical formula have been used to estimate the fertility and marital fertility using the CWR of the ages 0-9. The 2011 census age-sex data of districts in India was used to derive a set of fertility estimates for total, rural and urban areas of all districts. Further, these estimates of 2011 have been compared with the estimates of 2011 earlier made by Guilmoto and Rajan to analyse the robustness of the estimates.