Is India’s religiosity linked to its relative impoverishment? The correlation was made in a survey by Pew Research Center, an American think tank, which found that the majority of Indians still place very high importance on religion in their daily lives.
The survey, published in December 2015, analysed the religiousness of various countries by asking respondents how important religion is in their everyday lives. India featured high in the charts, with 80% of the respondents here replying that it is very important for them. To put that in perspective, only 3% in China gave grave importance to religion, and the global median in the survey was 55%.
Pew Research Center said that there is a correlation between the religiousness of respondents and the national income of their countries. On the whole, it said, countries with a higher gross domestic product are less religious and vice versa. The exception to this general principle is the United States, where 53% of the respondents asserted that religion holds an important place in their lives.
“Americans are much more likely than their counterparts in other economically advanced nations to say religion is very important,” the research organisation said. “About twice as many or more Americans say religion is very important in their lives compared with the share of people who say this in Australia (18%), Germany (21%) and Canada (27%), the next three wealthiest countries included in our survey.”
The global trends suggest that religiousness is on a decline in the world.
In India too, the number of people who profess following no religion has risen. When the Census 2011 data on religion was released in September, it revealed that around 29 lakh people in the country preferred not indicating their religion. This was a significant rise from a decade back, when only 7 lakh people were recorded under the “religion not stated” category in the 2001 census.
