India, Aug. 26 -- The public discourse around demographics in India is usually divisive. Sometimes it is about the population as a whole, at other times, its religious composition, and still other times, the north-versus-south debate. The overall demographic paranoia is perhaps a ghost of the early years of independence, when population growth far outpaced the growth in economic resources, including food. These pages have argued in detail why India needs to get over its demographic paranoia and instead focus on exploiting its demographic dividend. Debates about the North versus the South are rooted in distributional concerns, both fiscal and political; and the faith debate is overwhelmingly political dog-whistling. This two-part data journa...