Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 1).djvu/120

100 Report gives the details. The increase in the decade was on paper 8| p.c, distributed between 5| in Jammu, 12 in Kashmir, and 14 in the Indus valley. A great part of the increase in the last must be put down to better enumeration.

Health and duration of life.— The climate of the Panjab plains has produced a vigorous, but not a long-lived, race. The mean age of the whole population in the British districts is only 25. The normal birth-rate of the Panjab is about 41 per 1000, which exceeds the English rate in the proportion of 5 to 3. In 1910 the recorded birth-rate in the N.W.F. Province was 38 per 1000. Till plague appeared the Panjab death-rate averaged 32 or 33 per 1000, or more than double that of England. The infantile mortality is enormous, and one out of every four or five children fails to survive its first year. The death-rate in the N.W.F. Province was 27 per 1000 in 1910. In the ten years ending 1910 plague pushed up the average death-rate in the Panjab to 43! per 1000. Even now malarial fever is a far worse foe than plague. The average annual deaths in the ten years ending 1910 were:


 * Fevers .. ..  .. 450,376
 * Plague .. ..  .. 202,522
 * Other diseases .. 231,473
 * Total .. 884,371