Just recently, the Daily Mirror reported
that marriages had declined over the past four years every year. So in 2011
when there were 200,214 marriages, by 2014 it had dropped to 175,728.
No explanations were given, no hints at
possibilities just stating a fact. This was attributed to the Census
Department, so the explanation was presumably for them to make, which they had
failed to give in the article, see link.
Of course it is for us to speculate.
Would it have something to do with a birth rate decline and total births
declining 20 years earlier, once the baby boom generation had produced kids? I
don’t know. However it would have been useful to give some rational
explanations as to why it would have happened.
It is very IMPORTANT that we take these
statistics and make important planning and policy decisions, before we face an
unforeseen problem. It is always best to foresee an outcome, when we have date
from which we can extrapolate.
The 12% decline in marriages is
statistically significant, especially as it has been on a steadily declining
trend, and explanations will help us in determining if people are either getting
married late, or there is a shortage of marriageable age males!
On the other hand environmental factors that
may have affected fertility then is finally resulting in this, and could be a sign
of declining population earlier than we envisaged. With declining fertility rates,
we must look at other patterns, of whether it is due to education, where people
decide wantonly to have fewer kinds or if it is environmental, where pollution and
other factors, affect male and female reproductive capacity.
Only once we have some answers to these questions
can we begin to take practical steps to correct an imbalance, if that is what is
required, or explain away factors such as the forced separation of married women
of reproductive age for long periods from their homes by foreign employment, affecting
the family size.
Sri Lanka has been pretty adept at keeping
various census data through the years, but has been impossibly inept in interpreting
the data available to assist the Government in making correct forecasts for policy
planning purposes.
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