Using facts to counter propaganda

P N MARI BHAT (1951 - 2007)

When higher Muslim fertility levels were used to raise all manner of fears, Mari Bhat showed how this gap was shrinking quite rapidly.

Professor P N Mari Bhat, India's leading demographer, died of a sudden heart attack on July 30, 2007. He had diabetes, but with his characteristically positive approach to life he kept it under control and ignored its difficult side-effects. He was only 56 years old, and was just building up to the culmination of his professional life as Director of India's premier demographic teaching and research institute "" the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai.

Mari felt his way slowly at first in his academic career. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics from the University of Mysore in 1970, followed in 1972 by a Masters degree in Psychology from Andhra University. He first found his niche as a demographer when he went to IIPS to take their Diploma in Population Studies in 1975. After this, he worked for five years at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bangalore, and then went to the University of Pennsylvania to do a Master's and PhD in Demography.

Mari's advisor at Pennsylvania was Sam Preston, one of a very small handful of demographers around the world who is not only an excellent mathematical demographer but also has the knack of identifying fascinating lines of research. Mari worked closely with him, and became one of this small handful of creative mathematical demographers.

Mari could have obtained well-paid jobs in the US and elsewhere, but he always chose to live life on his own terms. For him, this meant focusing his high level of energy and passion solely on the work he wanted to do, avoiding other job-related distractions. It also meant living and working in India, and contributing to debates in India in a hands-on fashion.

His professional career took a series of quite sharp turns, segmented into phases. During his time at ISEC, his publications were relatively few. At the University of Pennsylvania, he co-authored with Sam Preston and Tim Dyson a classic study of mortality and fertility rates in India. Through the rest of his career, the backbone of his work was to publish authoritative estimates of demographic rates and trends in India. After Pennslyvania, Mari worked at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum for three years, during which time he coordinated a training programme.

The most creative phase of his career began when he moved to the quiet life of a pure researcher, as Director of the Population Research Centre in Dharwad (1991-97). His publications during this phase are peppered with papers exploring new issues. His approach to such research was typically iconoclastic. In a paper with Irudaya Rajan, he added a twist to the accepted wisdom that women have more autonomy in south India than in the north, by showing that orphans' excess mortality is lower in north India than in the south. Other fascinating work during this period includes an analysis of how changing availability of spouses may have contributed to rises in dowry payments over the twentieth century in India.

Mari then moved to Delhi to take up a professorship at the Institute for Economic Growth (IEG). This period marked a shift from being a pure researcher to a more active role in advising various government ministries and other institutions on demographic issues. He also continued with very creative research, including on religious differentials in fertility and mortality in India. As he pointed out, this is a highly politicised subject on which much baseless propaganda is disseminated. Mari countered such propaganda with an authoritative assessment of exactly how much of a differential there is between religious groups in their fertility levels, and how this varies over time and between states. His data show that Muslims in India do indeed have higher fertility than Hindus, but this gap is shrinking quite rapidly. By the time India's population growth stabilises by the mid-21st century, the proportion of Muslims will have increased to 18 per cent of the total population "" certainly higher than that of today, but a far cry from the claims of fear-mongers.

In 2005, Mari took up the position of Director of IIPS. The last time I met him, he spoke passionately of his plans for the institution "" how to expand the range of work done there to address newly emerging issues of importance for India, and how to add to the faculty and help them to flourish professionally. He threw himself into the task of increasing the institution's footprint nationally and internationally. The international aspect of the institute's footprint is easy to forget, given its visibility in Indian population studies, but IIPS was established as an international training centre and its alumni include Jiang Zhenghua who is now a Vice-President in the People's Republic of China. Mari sought to re-invigorate IIPS' international reach in a variety of ways, such as organising its 50th anniversary celebration in December 2006 around the theme of "Emerging Population Issues in the Asia-Pacific Region: challenges for the 21st century," with a wide range of international scholars and alumni presenting their work.

Mari's death is a severe blow for the demographic profession in India and globally. He is survived by his wife and two daughters. He will also be deeply missed by all of us who knew him, his warmth, integrity, and generosity of spirit.