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asdftimes7 t1_jdo13co wrote

Reply to comment by apez- in New project aims to bring education to 10 million girls in rural India by Sidjoneya

>India's birthrate was high in the 1900s which makes sense since the whole country was primarily an agrarian society which was also heavily exploited and in extreme poverty.

The real reason was the sky high child mortality. No matter how many kids you had chances of having a few survive was low.

One of my great uncles had 14 kids. None survived. Another relative had twenty one of which nine survived.

My mother reckons child mortality was at least 50 percent. She is the only surviving child out of two siblings

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Spire_Citron t1_jdo55ep wrote

Yup. That's why people had so many kids. Then once child mortality rates drop, it can take a couple of generations for people to realise they can have fewer kids without much risk of ending up with them all dead.

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PurpleCheeseMama t1_jdoeicv wrote

My grandma was born pre-independance and she tells these stories about how the britishers used to just randomly take away the kids as slaves and some of them were seen again. And if the family participated in sort of pre-independance activities then all their kids would be whipped and killed right in of the parents. Considering she's not even 100 years old, it's just scary to imagine what would have happened to us if we still hadn't fought for freedom.

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