Estimating the incidence of widow and widower re-marriages in India from census data

Summary In this paper we develop a method for estimating the incidence of widow and widower re-marriages from the current marital status data given in a census or survey. The method basically consists of reversing the procedure of estimating adult mortality from information on widowhood status. The method is applied to the all-India data from the Census of 1971. The principal result is that about one-third of the ever widowed women and slightly fewer than two-thirds of the ever widowed men were currently remarried in 1971. Similar application of the method to earlier censuses, and to state-level data, may provide answers to some of the riddles in Indian sociology.