Fertility, mortality and gender bias among tribal population: an Indian perspective.

The present paper critically reviews the existing literature on fertility, mortality and its gender bias among India's tribal population in the post-Independence period. Despite difficulties and limitations of available literature on tribal demography--most of which has been produced by anthropologists--our review extracts several interesting and important points. First, although fertility and mortality levels for some tribes and for some regions are either lower or higher or even the same as those for nontribal groups, India's aggregate tribal population evinces both lower fertility and mortality than the levels for their closest comparable nontribal group, namely low caste people.