Genghis Khan is said to have had some 3,000 progeny but Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif, an 18th century Alawite ruler of Morocco, is credited with being the world’s most prolific father, with 867 ‘verified’ offspring. His harem had over 500 women so that is statistically very probable. Sperm donation made Bertold Wiesner and Jonathan Jacob Meijer fathers to around 600 children each. But West Bengal’s Special Intensive Review (SIR) of voter lists has added a new dimension.

Thanks to scrutiny by the Supreme Court of India, trends revealed by the SIR being conducted by the Election Commission in West Bengal are coming into the public domain which portend to upend some surmises based on other data. According to it, two Indian ‘electors’ are listed as fathers of 389 and 310 children each, the first from Barabani in Asansol district and the second from Bally in Howrah district. Two more people have been found to have over 200 progeny.

Another seven have been named as the fathers of over 100 voters each, while 10 have been cited as parents of over 50 voting-age people each. This, even though the National Family Health Survey of 2019-21 says the average household size in India is 4.4 persons (having declined from 4.9 a decade before that) while the worldwide average is 3.4. Moreover, West Bengal’s average as per this survey is 4.0 and 60 per cent of the households are nuclear. So large families do stand out.

Without any as-yet-known links to fertility........

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