INDIA: India's dwindling population of Parsees, who are part of the 3,500-year-old Zoroastrian religion, have launched a novel experiment to increase their numbers. They plan to donate flats to young community members on condition they marry one of their own and procreate.
With seven babies born to Parsee parents over the past two years in the western Indian port city of Surat, the plan seems to be working.
"With a roof over our heads we have been able to raise our family," said Adil Kasad (30). He and his wife Dilshad's (25) two-year-old son, Sheroy, was born in the 24-apartment complex bequeathed by the prosperous and philanthropic community to young Parsee couples after they promised to marry within their community and have children.
Parsees are quietly uncompromising in maintaining their racial purity. Most Zoroastrian priests refuse to perform the Navjote ceremony or rites of admission into the religion for children from mixed marriages.
Built at a cost of 350 million rupees (€6 million) with donations from Parsees living overseas and the local Parsee Society, the Surat flats have emerged as a kind of incubator of hope, in that they will prevent the community from facing extinction.
The number of Parsees worldwide is estimated to be fewer than 100,000, with their largest concentration (69,601) being in the western Indian port city of Mumbai (Bombay). But by 2020, this number is expected to drop to around 23,000, or a mere 0.0002 per cent of India's population of over 1.2 billion.
Parsees immigrated to India more than 1,000 years ago from Persia to escape religious persecution by Muslims and promised local rulers in western Indian they would not proselytise. Many rose to be taipans (business leaders) under colonial rule, establishing industrial and trading houses in Bombay, which remain prosperous today.
Meanwhile, a Parsee woman activist has triggered a row over the centuries-old tradition of her community's use of vultures to dispose of their dead, by sending gruesome pictures of rotting corpses to hundreds of homes.
About three Parsee bodies a day are left to be stripped clean at a private, wooded 45-acre complex in Mumbai's centre, but the practice is threatened by a dramatic decline in vulture numbers.
The controversy erupted after scenes from inside the 350-year-old Towers of Silence were revealed by Dhun Baria (65), who printed leaflets with grainy pictures of bodies and distributed them to 2,000 homes.
She said she only learned what happened behind the walls of the squat circular towers after her mother's body was taken when she died eight months ago.
"The staff told me everything. They said: 'Madam, it's a hell inside'," she said.
"I was crying a whole day and a night. It's the biggest mistake of my life that I have put my mother inside there. I thought I must help to change this system."
Baria's actions have horrified orthodox Parsees, who have condemned her for making public their sacred and closely guarded ritual.
The Parsees cannot cremate, bury or submerge their dead in water because they consider a corpse impure and their Zoroastrian faith does not permit them to defile any of the elements.
This desert ritual dictates that the dead be left to vultures on hilltops known as doongerwadis (towers of silence). However, the declining vulture population in the early 1990s led to the Parsees installing eight solar reflectors in the towers to help decompose the bodies faster. But these have not proven enough, and pictures reportedly show several dozen bloated and blackened bodies.