TEHRAN – Some 1,196,135 infants have been born during the past Iranian calendar year (Mach 2019-March 2020), more than 18,000 of which were multiple births.

Some 524 triplet births and 18 higher-order multiple births happened in the country last year, IRNA quoted Seifollah Aboutorabi, the National Organization for Civil Registration spokesman, as saying on Friday.

Last year, some 616,494 of the infants were boys and 579,641 were girls.

A year before (Mach 2018-March 2019), there were 1,366,509 registered births across the country, of whom 704,054 were baby boys and 662,455 were girls.

The average age of the fathers and mothers at the time of the child's birth was 33.8 years and 29.1 years, respectively.

On May 20, deputy health minister Seyed Hamed Barakati said that the country's population growth rate has decreased to less than one percent for the first time over the past four decades.

At the beginning of the Islamic revolution (in 1979), the country's population grew by 2.5 percent annually, however, suddenly, population growth reached about 1.5 percent in the 1970s, he highlighted.

According to the data released by the National Organization for Civil Registration, comparing past three years shows some 1,196,135 infants were born in the country whose births were registered last year, while 1,366,509 births occurred a year before it, and 1,487,913 births have been recorded in the Iranian calendar year 1395 (March 2016-March 2017), a difference of roughly over 100,000 per year.

FB/MG