Chapter 7: Population
On a cold night at the end of February 2011, an enumerator walked the pavements of a large Indian city with a torch and a printed schedule. Her task that night was to count the people who had no house at all — those sleeping on footpaths, under flyovers, and at bus stands. Across the country, on that same reference night, thousands of others were doing exactly the same thing. It was one small part of the largest peacetime head-count on Earth.
The 2011 Census of India set out to count every person living within the country’s borders, and it reached 1,210,193,422. Doing so took about 2.7 million enumerators, most of them schoolteachers, walking house to house through more than six lakh villages and thousands of towns. In the snow-bound valleys of the Himalayas, where winter would soon seal the passes, the count was taken months earlier, in October 2010, rather than in the spring.
Every figure in this chapter begins with that walk — how crowded Bihar is, how empty Arunachal Pradesh is, how fast or slowly a state is growing. A census does not estimate or sample; it tries to reach each individual and record them exactly once. The map of India’s people that emerges from it is startlingly uneven, and behind that unevenness lies a story of land, water, soil, and work.
Diagram
Fig. 7.0-1 Caption: The census reaches each person once, in two phases, on a single reference date. Brief: A clean schematic (not a data chart, no ASCII) of the 2011 Census operation, read left to right. Show Phase 1 — Houselisting and Housing Census (2010) — as houses being listed, then an arrow to Phase 2 — Population Enumeration (February 2011) — as an enumerator with a schedule reaching individual households. Mark the reference moment ‘00:00 hours, 1 March 2011’ at which the count is fixed. Add a small inset noting that snow-bound Himalayan areas were counted earlier, with reference date 1 October 2010. Emphasise the caption idea that each person is counted once. Any India outline used in the inset must show the full official extent of India, including Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. Arrows point left to right, following the sequence of the two phases.
7.1 India In The World’s Population
India is one of the most populous countries on Earth. To make sense of any single Indian figure in this chapter, it helps to first see the country against the world as a whole.
The striking fact is a mismatch. India occupies only a small slice of the planet’s land, yet it is home to a very large slice of the planet’s people. That gap between land and people is the starting point for everything that follows.
7.1.2 India’s Position Among Nations
At the turn of the twenty-first century, India became the second country in the world, after China, to cross the one-billion mark. Its population reached a billion around the year 2000.
For most of the twentieth century China held the top position. That changed in 2023, when India passed China to become the most populous country on Earth. By 2024, India’s population was estimated at about 1.44 billion — roughly 144 crore.
That recent figure is an estimate, not a count. India’s last census was taken in 2011, and every national total quoted for the years since then comes from official projections rather than a fresh enumeration.
No other country comes close to India’s or China’s share. The United States, third in the world by population, supports only about 4.5 per cent of the world’s people. Countries as large in area as Canada and Australia each support well under one per cent. In short, only India and China shape the lives of more than a billion people each.
7.2 The Census: How India Is Counted
Every figure in this chapter — every density, every growth rate, every state total — rests on one source. Before we read any of those numbers, we should understand where they come from and how far we can trust them.
That source is the census. A census is a complete count of every person in a defined area at a single point in time, recording their basic characteristics along the way. The key word is complete: a census does not question a fraction of people and scale the answer up. It sets out to reach each individual, once.
This is what separates a census from a sample survey. A survey studies a small share of people and estimates the rest; a census attempts to touch everyone. That is also why a census is slow, costly and taken only rarely.
India’s Census: A Ten-Year Rhythm
Census-taking in India began in 1872. That first effort was neither complete nor taken on a single date, so its figures could not be fully relied upon. The first complete and synchronous census — one that covered the whole country with a common reference moment — was conducted in 1881.
Since 1881 the census has been repeated every tenth year without a break. The 2011 Census was therefore the fifteenth count since 1872, and the seventh taken since Independence.
The count is a Union responsibility, carried out by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, under the Census Act of 1948. That law also keeps each person’s individual record confidential; the published figures are always totals for areas, never details about named individuals.
Why A Common Moment Matters
Fixing one reference moment for the whole country solves a real problem. People are always moving — to work, to markets, to relatives. If different places counted on different days, a traveller might be recorded twice, or missed altogether. A shared reference date freezes the picture so that each person belongs to exactly one place on that day.
Because it aims at a complete count, the census gives us figures we treat as authoritative, right down to the level of a single village. But that authority has limits. The census is taken only once in a decade, so for every year in between, national and state totals are estimates rather than counts. And the people who move most — seasonal migrants, the homeless — are the hardest to reach and the easiest to miss.
7.3 The Distribution Of Population
The census hands us a single national total for 2011: 1,210.2 million people. But a total tells us how many Indians there are, not where they live. For that we need to look at how the people are spread across the country.
The distribution of population is the way people are arranged across space — where they gather and where they are thinly scattered. India’s distribution is one of the most uneven in the world, and the rest of this chapter is largely an attempt to explain why.
7.3.1 An Uneven Spread Across The States
The unevenness is clearest at the level of the states. Uttar Pradesh alone holds about 199.5 million people — more than most countries. It is followed by Maharashtra (112.3 million), Bihar (103.8 million), West Bengal (91.3 million) and Andhra Pradesh (84.6 million).
These five states together account for close to half of India’s population. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra by themselves are home to more than one-fourth of all Indians.
On the ground, the people gather where the land is kind and scatter where it is harsh. The dots crowd along the Ganga plain and the coastal strips, and thin out across the Thar desert, the high Himalayas, the forested plateaus and the hills of the north-east. A dot-distribution map, where each dot stands for a fixed number of people, shows this at a glance (Map 7.1).
Map
Map 7.1 Caption: The people crowd along the Ganga plain and the coasts and thin out over the desert, the mountains and the plateaus. Brief: A dot-distribution map of India for the 2011 Census, one dot representing 250,000 persons. Show heavy dotting across the Ganga plain (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal) and along the eastern and western coastal plains; sparse dotting over the Thar desert of Rajasthan, the high Himalayas, the forested Chota Nagpur and central plateaus, and the north-eastern hills. Include a scale bar and the dot-value key. The map must show the full official extent of India, including Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.
7.3.2 Area Does Not Equal Population
It is tempting to assume that a large state holds a large population. The map warns us not to. A big share of land does not buy a big share of people.
Rajasthan is the largest Indian state by area, covering about 10.4 per cent of the country, yet it supports only about 5.67 per cent of its people. Madhya Pradesh, the second largest by area at about 9.4 per cent, holds only about 6.0 per cent. The opposite case is just as sharp: Uttar Pradesh carries 16.49 per cent of India’s people on only about 7.3 per cent of its land, and Bihar packs 8.58 per cent of the people onto just 2.9 per cent. Set the two shares side by side and the mismatch is plain.
Read across the rows. For Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh the area column is larger than the population column — much land, fewer people. For Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the reverse holds — little land, many people. So people are not spread in proportion to territory at all.
This is exactly why distribution alone is not enough. Knowing that a state holds many people does not tell us whether they are crowded or comfortable, because it ignores the size of the land they sit on. To measure crowding, we must bring area into the picture — and that is what density does.
7.3.3 The Index Of Concentration
Before we turn to density, there is one more way of reading distribution. The index of concentration is the share of India’s total population that lives in a single state or union territory, written as a percentage.
\[\text{Index of concentration} = \frac{\text{Population of the state or union territory}}{\text{Total population of India}} \times 100 \quad (\text{per cent})\]
It condenses a state’s whole share into one comparable number. We can work it out for the most populous state.
So about 16.49 of every 100 Indians live in Uttar Pradesh alone — the highest index of concentration of any state in 2011. At the other extreme, Sikkim’s index is just 0.05 per cent, the lowest of any state, and among the union territories Lakshadweep’s is only 0.01 per cent. But notice what the index still leaves out. A high index tells us a state holds a large slice of India’s people; it says nothing about whether those people are crowded, because it never mentions the state’s area. That missing piece — people measured against land — is density, and it is where we go next.
7.4 The Density Of Population
Distribution tells us where people are. It does not tell us how tightly they are packed, because it never weighs the number of people against the amount of land. Density does exactly that, and so it is the sharper measure of pressure on the land.
7.4.1 Measuring Density: Arithmetic, Physiological And Agricultural
The density of population is the number of people living on each unit of area. In its simplest form it is the ratio of a region’s population to its area.
\[\text{Arithmetic density} = \frac{\text{Total population}}{\text{Total area}} \quad (\text{persons per km}^2)\]
For India in 2011, the total population of about 1,210.1 million lived on an area of about 3.17 million square kilometres, giving
\[\frac{1210.1 \text{ million}}{3.17 \text{ million km}^2} \approx 382 \text{ persons per km}^2.\]
So on average about 382 people share every square kilometre of India. That is far above China’s figure of roughly 141, and among the world’s ten most populous countries India is second only to Bangladesh, whose density is over 1,100. This is a crowded country.
This simplest form is called arithmetic density, because it divides the people over all the land — deserts, mountains and forests included, even though none of these feeds anyone. Two other measures narrow the land down to what actually matters.
Physiological density divides the total population only by the net cultivated area — the land actually sown with crops.
\[\text{Physiological density} = \frac{\text{Total population}}{\text{Net cultivated area}} \quad (\text{persons per km}^2)\]
Agricultural density goes one step further. It divides only the agricultural population — the cultivators and agricultural labourers, together with their families — by the net cultivable area, the land that can be brought under the plough.
\[\text{Agricultural density} = \frac{\text{Total agricultural population}}{\text{Net cultivable area}} \quad (\text{persons per km}^2)\]
The difference between arithmetic and physiological density is where the real lesson lies.
The physiological density is more than double the arithmetic density. The reason is simple: arithmetic density spreads the population over every kind of land, including the empty desert and the bare high mountain, while physiological density spreads it only over the land that grows food. India’s cropland therefore carries a far heavier load — about 847 people for every square kilometre that feeds them — than the headline figure of 382 ever admits. Density is a useful summary, but it is not the true measure of pressure on land, because only cultivable land sustains life.
7.4.2 The Pattern Across India’s States
The national average of 382 hides enormous variation. Among the states, density ranges from just 17 persons per square kilometre in Arunachal Pradesh to 1,102 in Bihar. Among the union territories the spread is wider still: Delhi is packed at 11,297 persons per square kilometre, while the Andaman and Nicobar Islands hold only 46.
A clear geography lies behind these numbers. The hilly and forested states of the north and north-east carry low densities — Sikkim 86, Jammu & Kashmir 124, Himachal Pradesh 123, Manipur 122, Meghalaya 132, Nagaland 119. The dry state of Rajasthan sits at 201. The peninsular plateau is moderately settled — Madhya Pradesh 236, Chhattisgarh 189, Odisha 269, Gujarat 308, Karnataka 319, Andhra Pradesh 308, Maharashtra 365. Density climbs sharply on the coasts and the northern plain — Tamil Nadu 555, Kerala 859, Punjab 550, Haryana 573, Uttar Pradesh 828, West Bengal 1,029, and Bihar highest of all at 1,102.
A shaded, or choropleth, map turns these figures into a picture (Map 7.2).
Map
Map 7.2 Caption: The darkest belt of density is the Ganga plain; the lightest are the mountains, the desert and the north-east. Brief: A choropleth (shaded) map of India showing population density by state and union territory for the 2011 Census, in five classes: 100 and below, 101–250, 251–500, 501–1000, and 1001 and above. Shade the Ganga-plain states (Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh) darkest; the Himalayan states, the north-east and the Thar desert lightest; the peninsular plateau in the middle classes. Include a shaded key. The map must show the full official extent of India, including Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.
Read the map alongside a physical map of India and the two almost overlap: dense where the land is flat, watered and fertile, thin where it is steep, dry or forested. That overlap is not a coincidence, and unpacking it is the work of the next section.
7.4.3 How Density Has Risen Since 1921
Density is not fixed. As people are added while the land stays the same size, the number of people per square kilometre climbs. In India that climb has been steep.
In 1921 India’s density was just 81 persons per square kilometre. By 2011 it had reached 382 — almost a five-fold rise in ninety years. The increase was gentle at first (81 in 1921 to 117 in 1951) and then accelerated: density rose faster between 1951 and 2011 than in any earlier stretch.
Graph
Fig. 7.4-1 Caption: India’s population density climbed from 81 in 1921 to 382 in 2011, rising fastest after 1951. Brief: A line graph. X-axis: census years from 1921 to 2011 at ten-year intervals. Y-axis: density in persons per square kilometre, 0 to 400. Plot the points 1921: 81, 1931: 90, 1941: 103, 1951: 117, 1961: 142, 1971: 177, 1981: 221, 1991: 267, 2001: 325, 2011: 382, and join them. Source of data: Census of India, decadal density figures.
A rising density line is the same story as rising population, seen from the side of the land. More people are being asked to live, farm and work on a fixed area. Why the numbers rose so fast after 1951 — and whether they can keep rising — is the question the second half of this chapter takes up.
7.5 Factors Affecting Distribution And Density
Lay the density map beside a physical map of India and they very nearly match: crowded where the land is flat, watered and fertile, empty where it is steep, dry or forested. That overlap is the clue. People do not settle at random; they settle where conditions let them live and work.
Four broad influences shape where Indians live: the landforms, the climate, the accessibility of a place, and its level of development. One rule holds throughout — these factors act in totality, never singly. A place is crowded or empty because of how several of them combine.
7.5.1 Physical Factors
The physical setting comes first, because it sets the limits within which people must live.
Landforms
Terrain is a powerful control. Level plains invite farming, roads, railways and industry, so they draw people; steep mountains restrict all of these, so they repel them. The Himalayan region occupies about 13 per cent of India’s land but supports only 1 to 2 per cent of its people. The Great Plain of North India, by contrast, covers less than a quarter of the country yet is home to more than half of all Indians.
Climate
Of the climatic controls, rainfall and temperature matter most, and extremes of either drive people away. The too-cold high Himalayas and the too-hot, too-dry Thar desert are both thinly peopled, while moderate climates are favourable.
Rainfall is the stronger of the two, because it supplies the water on which farming depends. It is often said that the population map of India follows its rainfall map. As one moves west from the well-watered Ganga-Brahmaputra delta towards the Thar desert, rainfall falls away and so does density.
There are honest exceptions. The Assam valley and the Northern Circars coast receive heavy rain yet carry only moderate densities, because floods, steep slopes and dense forests offset the gift of rain. And in the north-west — Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — canal irrigation has lifted density well above what the modest rainfall alone would allow. Temperature matters mainly at height: above about 2,000 metres the cold thins settlement, and above 3,000 metres there is almost none.
Soil And Water
Fertile soil supports dense population; infertile soil cannot. The northern alluvial plain, renewed each year by the floods of the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra, is a land of high density, as are the fertile coastal plains and the black soil of the Deccan. Desert, mountain and laterite soils are poor and hold few people.
Water completes the physical picture. It is needed for irrigation, industry, transport and daily life, and rivers are the great source of fresh water. So people concentrate in the river valleys, where the water is.
7.5.2 Economic And Human Factors
Physical conditions set the stage, but the level of development of a region can redraw the map on top of them. Where minerals, industry, transport and cities appear, people gather even on land that farming alone would not support.
Minerals And Industries
Minerals draw people, because mining and the industries built on it create work. The higher densities of the Chota Nagpur plateau in Jharkhand, and the adjoining parts of Odisha in eastern India, owe much to their mineral wealth rather than to any richness of soil.
Industry is an even stronger magnet. A factory offers work to people from far around, and one hectare of industrial land can support several thousand people, where the same hectare under crops might feed only a few hundred. (A hectare is a square of land 100 metres on each side; a hundred hectares make one square kilometre.) The phenomenal growth of industry is one reason for the high densities of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Accessibility And Urbanisation
Accessibility — the ease with which a place can be reached, by water or by road and rail — closely tracks density. The northern plain, with its dense transport network, is densely peopled; the peninsular plateau, moderately served, is moderately peopled; the Himalayan region, poorly served, is thinly peopled.
Finally, urbanisation — the growing share of people who live in towns and cities — concentrates population tightly. By census definition, an area needs a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre before it can be counted as urban, and the most urbanised districts run far past that: Kolkata, Chennai, Greater Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Chandigarh all exceed 6,000 persons per square kilometre.
The map of India’s people, then, is the sum of all these forces acting together. The physical setting lays down a base — plains and river valleys full, mountains and deserts empty — and the level of development reworks it, pulling extra people towards minerals, factories, routes and cities. No factor works alone, and reading any part of the map means asking which combination is doing the work.
7.6 The Growth Of Population: Basic Terms
So far we have looked at a still photograph — where people were in 2011. But population is never still. It grows, and occasionally shrinks, and the second half of this chapter is about that movement. Before we can trace it, we need a small set of exact terms.
A population is simply the total number of people living in a defined area at a given time. Its size changes for only two kinds of reason: people are born or die, and people move in or move out. Every term below is a way of measuring one of those changes.
The Rates That Drive Change
The birth rate, or crude birth rate, is the number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people in the population. The death rate, or crude death rate, is the number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people. Both are measured against the mid-year population — the population counted at the middle of the year, used as a common base so that different years can be compared fairly.
A population’s overall change over time is captured by its growth rate. The population growth rate is the change in the number of people between two points in time, written as a percentage of the starting figure.
\[\text{Growth rate} = \frac{P_2 - P_1}{P_1} \times 100 \quad (\text{per cent})\]
Here \(P_1\) is the population at the start of the period — the base year — and \(P_2\) is the population at the end, the present year. Because Indian censuses fall ten years apart, this is usually worked out as a decadal (ten-year) growth rate.
Natural Growth And Migratory Growth
The two engines of change are named separately. Natural growth is the difference between the birth rate and the death rate — the increase (or decrease) a population produces on its own, from births and deaths alone. Migratory growth is the change caused by migration: people moving into an area add to it, people moving out subtract from it.
Put together, these decide the direction of change. Positive growth means the population rises, because births outnumber deaths or more people arrive than leave. Negative growth means it falls, because deaths outnumber births or more people leave than arrive.
Flowchart
Fig. 7.6-1 Caption: A population changes through two engines — natural change from births and deaths, and migratory change from people moving in and out. Nodes: Population at start of period → births add people (+) and deaths remove people (−) → natural growth = birth rate minus death rate → in-migration adds people (+) and out-migration removes people (−) → migratory growth → natural growth and migratory growth combine → Population at end of period.
With these terms in hand, we can now read India’s growth over the last century — and ask why it moved the way it did.
7.7 A Century Of Growth: The Four Phases
Over the twentieth century India’s population grew from about 238 million in 1901 to 1,210 million in 2011 — it more than quintupled. But the growth was not smooth. Looked at decade by decade, the century falls into four clear phases.
Three census years mark the turning points between them: 1921, 1951 and 1981. A census year that marks a sharp change in the growth trend is called a demographic divide. The four phases are the stretches these divides mark off.
Graph
Fig. 7.7-1 Caption: India’s population rose from 238 million in 1901 to 1,210 million in 2011, through four distinct phases. Brief: A line graph. X-axis: census years 1901 to 2011 at ten-year intervals. Y-axis: population in millions, 0 to 1300. Plot and join the points 1901: 238.4, 1911: 252.1, 1921: 251.3, 1931: 279.0, 1941: 318.7, 1951: 361.1, 1961: 439.2, 1971: 548.2, 1981: 683.3, 1991: 846.4, 2001: 1028.7, 2011: 1210.2. Draw light vertical dividers at 1921, 1951 and 1981 and label the four phases beneath: Phase 1 — stagnant (1901–1921); Phase 2 — steady growth (1921–1951); Phase 3 — rapid growth (1951–1981); Phase 4 — high growth with signs of slowing (1981–2011). Source of data: Census of India.
7.7.1 Stagnation And Steady Growth, 1901 To 1951
In the first phase, 1901 to 1921, the population barely moved. It crept from 238.4 million in 1901 to 252.1 million in 1911, and then actually fell to 251.3 million in 1921 — a decline of about 0.31 per cent. This is the only decade in India’s census history in which the population went down.
The fall had brutal causes. The influenza pandemic of 1918 alone claimed around twelve million lives in India, and it came on top of plague, cholera, smallpox, repeated famines, and the First World War of 1914–18. Because of this reversal, 1921 is called the demographic divide, or the year of the great divide: after it, India’s population grew in every single decade without a break.
The second phase, 1921 to 1951, was one of steady growth. The population rose from 251 million to 361 million — an increase of about 44 per cent over thirty years, and, more importantly, an unbroken rise.
The reason lay in death, not birth. Improved medical care and sanitation reduced deaths from epidemics; famines grew less deadly; better transport carried food to areas of shortage; and farming improved. So the death rate fell, while the birth rate stayed high. Because the growth was driven mainly by this fall in deaths, this phase is described as ‘mortality-induced growth’.
7.7.2 Rapid Growth And The Signs Of Slowing, 1951 To 2011
The third phase, 1951 to 1981, was the steepest. The population nearly doubled — from 361 million to 683 million, a rise of about 89 per cent in just thirty years — and the decadal growth rate peaked in the 1961–71 decade at about 24.8 per cent. This is the period often called the population explosion.
Now the gap did the work. Accelerated development and better health cut the death rate far faster than the birth rate, which stayed high. The wide gap between many births and rapidly falling deaths produced a huge natural increase, so this phase is described as ‘fertility-induced growth’. The decadal growth rate over the whole century is easiest to follow as its own line.
Graph
Fig. 7.7-2 Caption: The decadal growth rate climbed to a peak in the 1960s and has fallen steadily since 1981. Brief: A line graph. X-axis: decades from 1951–1961 to 2001–2011. Y-axis: percentage decadal growth, 14 to 28 per cent. Plot and join the points 1951–1961: 21.51, 1961–1971: 24.80, 1971–1981: 24.66, 1981–1991: 23.85, 1991–2001: 21.54, 2001–2011: 17.64. Source of data: Census of India, decadal growth rates.
The fourth phase, 1981 to 2011, is the most hopeful. Growth stayed high but began, for the first time, to slow. The decadal rate fell from 23.85 per cent (1981–91) to 21.54 per cent (1991–2001) and then to 17.64 per cent (2001–11). The birth rate dropped sharply while the death rate fell more slowly, so the gap between them narrowed. This decline reflects both official birth-control efforts and people’s own growing preference for smaller families, and it marks the start of a new era in India’s demographic history.
Yet the total kept rising fast, and this is the puzzle worth pausing on.
The growth rate fell sharply — from 21.54 to 17.64 per cent — yet the number of people actually added barely changed: about 182 million, then about 181 million. That is the whole point. A smaller percentage of a far larger base is still an enormous number. This is why India kept adding people as quickly as ever even while its growth rate was falling, and it is a large part of why the total keeps climbing.
7.8 Birth Rate, Death Rate And Natural Increase
The four phases of the last section were not accidents. Behind them lie two numbers, moving against each other: the birth rate and the death rate. The distance between the two — the natural increase — is what actually made the population grow or hold steady. To understand the growth, we watch these two rates.
The Death Rate Falls First
The death rate fell early and dramatically. Around the 1950s it stood at about 28 deaths per 1,000 people each year; by the decade 2001–2011 it had dropped to about 7. That is a fall of three-quarters.
The reasons were medical and social. Epidemics that once killed in millions — plague, cholera, malaria, smallpox — were brought under control. Sanitation improved, food supply became more secure, and modern medicine reached more people. Fewer people died, and they died later.
The Birth Rate Falls Later
The birth rate stayed high for much longer. Around the 1950s it was about 42 births per 1,000 people; it did not begin to fall sharply until the 1980s, reaching about 22 by 2001–2011. Births fall more slowly than deaths, because having fewer children depends on slower social changes — the spread of education, later marriage, the confidence that children born will survive, and access to family planning.
The Gap: Natural Increase
Because the death rate fell fast while the birth rate lagged, the gap between the two — the natural increase — first grew wider. It peaked at about 22 per 1,000 in the 1960s and 1970s, and that wide gap is exactly what produced the population explosion of the third phase. Only when the birth rate finally fell did the gap begin to close.
Graph
Fig. 7.8-1 Caption: The death rate fell faster than the birth rate, so the gap between them — the natural increase — first widened and then narrowed. Brief: A line graph with two lines. X-axis: decades 1951–1961 to 2001–2011. Y-axis: rate per 1,000 people, 0 to 45. Birth-rate line: 1951–61: 41.7, 1961–71: 41.1, 1971–81: 37.2, 1981–91: 29.5, 1991–2001: 25.4, 2001–11: 21.8. Death-rate line: 1951–61: 28.0, 1961–71: 19.0, 1971–81: 15.0, 1981–91: 9.8, 1991–2001: 8.4, 2001–11: 7.1. Label the two lines, and mark the vertical distance between them as the natural increase. Source of data: Census of India and the Sample Registration System.
The Story Since 1991
The recent decades are where the good news shows. Between 1991 and 2001 the birth rate was about 25.4 and the death rate about 8.4 per 1,000, giving a natural increase of about 17.0. Between 2001 and 2011 the birth rate fell further to about 21.8 and the death rate to about 7.1, and the natural increase narrowed to about 14.7 per 1,000.
That narrowing gap — from 17.0 to 14.7 — is a positive signal. It shows the birth rate now falling faster than the death rate, which is the demographic sign that growth is at last easing.
Even so, a natural increase of 14.7 per 1,000 is small only in appearance. Applied to a base of over 1.2 billion people, it still adds many millions every year. The engine is easing, but it is turning a very large wheel — which is why India’s growth, though slowing, still shows up as a huge number, as the previous section’s worked case made plain.
7.9 Regional Variations In Population Growth
The national growth rate of 17.64 per cent for 2001–2011 is a single, tidy number. It is also, on its own, misleading. It is an average, and behind it lie states growing more than twice as fast as the country and states barely growing at all. Reading growth at the national scale hides almost everything that matters.
A Widening Slow-Growth Belt
For decades the slowest-growing states were in the south. That belt has widened. In 2001–2011 the southern states grew modestly — Kerala just 4.86 per cent, Tamil Nadu 15.60, Karnataka 15.67 and Andhra Pradesh 11.10 — but so did Punjab (13.73) and Himachal Pradesh (12.81) in the north, West Bengal (13.93) and Odisha (13.97) in the east, and Maharashtra (15.99) in the west. Across a broad band of the country, growth had fallen into the 11–16 per cent range.
These are states where the birth rate has fallen furthest, further along the transition described in the last section. Kerala’s 4.86 per cent — the lowest of any state — reflects a birth rate now close to those of the developed world.
The Fast-Growing States
Fast growth was concentrated in the large states of the north and in several smaller states. Bihar grew by 25.07 per cent, Rajasthan by 21.44, Madhya Pradesh by 20.30 and Uttar Pradesh by 20.09, while Jammu & Kashmir (23.71), Chhattisgarh (22.59) and Jharkhand (22.34) also grew above 22 per cent. Among the smaller states, Meghalaya recorded the highest state growth of all at 27.82 per cent, and Arunachal Pradesh grew by 25.92. In these states the birth rate is still comparatively high, so natural increase remains large.
One state stood apart. Nagaland was the only state to record negative growth in 2001–2011, at about −0.47 per cent — a sharp reversal from its very high growth of the previous decade.
When Migration Does The Growing
The fastest growth of all was in two small union territories: Dadra and Nagar Haveli (55.50 per cent) and Daman and Diu (53.54). Their surge was not a matter of births. It was migratory growth — workers moving in to their industrial estates from surrounding regions. By contrast, Lakshadweep, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Goa all grew in single digits.
We can now see growth as a shaded map (Map 7.3).
Map
Map 7.3 Caption: Growth in 2001–2011 was fast across much of the north and slow across the south, with one state actually shrinking. Brief: A choropleth (shaded) map of India showing percentage decadal population growth for 2001–2011, in classes: less than 0, 0–5.00, 5.01–10.00, 10.01–15.00, 15.01–20.00, 20.01–25.00, and 25.01 and above. Shade Bihar, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the higher bands; Kerala and much of the south, plus Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal and Odisha, in the lower bands; and Nagaland in the ‘less than 0’ class. Include a shaded key. The map must show the full official extent of India, including Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.
The lesson is one of scale. The country’s headline growth rate describes no real state. To understand where India’s people are actually being added, you have to drop from the national figure to the state, and within a state to the district — because the average, however useful, always conceals the very differences that explain it.
7.10 Implications Of Rapid Growth For Development
We have seen how many Indians there are, where they live, and how fast their numbers have grown. The last question is the hardest: what does all this growth mean for the country’s development and for the land it depends on? Two pressures stand out — one on livelihoods, one on the environment — and both point to the same answer.
7.10.1 The Pressure On Development And Livelihoods
Rapid growth makes development harder, because every gain has to be shared among more people. A country can build more schools, grow more food and create more jobs, yet if its population is rising quickly, the extra effort may only keep pace — like running fast to stay in the same place.
The scale of that effort is easy to underestimate. The roughly 181 million people India added in the single decade 2001–2011 is larger than the population of all but a handful of countries in the world. Those extra people, in just ten years, all need to be fed, housed, schooled and given work.
The shortfalls are real and should be named plainly. Despite large gains in farming and industry, a great many Indians still lack enough food, secure pucca (permanent) housing, safe drinking water, electricity and proper health care, and malnutrition remains widespread. At the 2011 Census about a quarter of Indians could not read and write; literacy stood at about 74 per cent.
It would be a mistake, though, to blame the numbers alone. How resources are shared, and how much inequality there is, shape these outcomes just as much as sheer population size. Rapid growth does not by itself cause poverty — but it does make the task of overcoming it steeper.
There is another side to this. A fast-growing population is also a young one, with many people about to enter their working years. That can be a great asset — a large, energetic workforce — if there are jobs and education to match, or a heavy strain if there are not. Which of the two it becomes is a matter of planning, not of numbers.
7.10.2 Population And The Environment
More people means more demand — for food, homes, fuel, water and goods — and that demand is met by drawing harder on the natural world. Soil, water, air, forests, minerals and sources of energy all come under greater pressure, and many of them, especially the minerals, are exhaustible: nature has fixed limits to what can be taken.
To weigh this pressure, geographers borrow a word from biology. Ecology is the study of the relationships between living things and their environment, and the ecological balance is the steady state in which those relationships sustain life. Growing human demand can upset that balance.
The signs are visible across India. Forests in the Ganga plain and its terai fringe have been cleared to make farmland, shrinking habitats and biodiversity. Over-irrigation on intensively watered plains has turned once-fertile land saline and waterlogged, so that it grows less than before. Continuous over-cropping exhausts the soil, mining scars the land and reduces biodiversity, and growing cities foul their air, water and soundscape.
But the relationship between people and the environment is not as simple as more people, more damage. A few people who consume a great deal can strain resources more than many who consume little, and careful management can stretch resources far further than careless use. So the harm depends not only on how many people there are, but on how each of them lives and how the resources are managed.
The Need For Planned Development
The conclusion the geographer draws is not simply that India needs fewer people. It is that India needs sustainable development — meeting the needs of today without using up what the next generation will need. The environment is best seen not as a store to be emptied but as capital to be managed carefully.
Two things help. First, India’s growth is already slowing, as the falling birth rate of the last two decades showed, so the pressure will ease with time on its own. Second, and more within our control, is planning: spreading resources and services more fairly, restoring degraded land, using water and forests within their limits, and developing in a way the land and water can bear. That is what it means to develop while keeping the ecological balance intact.
7.11 Summary
India occupies only about 2.4 per cent of the world’s land but supports about 17.5 per cent of its people — close to one in six. In 2023 it passed China to become the most populous country, reaching about 1.44 billion by 2024.
Every figure in this chapter comes from the census — a complete count of every person, taken every ten years since 1881 (2011 was the fifteenth since 1872). It is trusted because it counts everyone once, but it is a decade old and misses the most mobile people.
India’s population is very unevenly distributed. Five states hold about half of all Indians, and Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra alone hold more than a quarter. A large share of area does not buy a large share of people: Rajasthan has much land and few people, Bihar the reverse. The index of concentration expresses each state’s share of the national total; Uttar Pradesh’s is highest, at 16.49 per cent.
Density measures people against land — about 382 persons per square kilometre in 2011. Arithmetic density spreads people over all land; physiological density, over only the cultivated land, reveals a far higher pressure (about 847). Density ranges from 17 in Arunachal Pradesh to 1,102 in Bihar, and has risen almost five-fold since 1921. But a density is an average, and averages hide the districts inside them.
Where people live is shaped by physical factors (landforms, climate and rainfall, soil, water) and human factors (minerals, industry, accessibility, urbanisation), always acting together. The population map largely follows the physical map, which the level of development then reworks.
A population changes in two ways: natural growth (birth rate minus death rate) and migratory growth (people moving in or out). The decadal growth rate is (P₂ − P₁) ÷ P₁ × 100.
Over 1901–2011 India’s population passed through four phases: stagnant (1901–1921, with 1921 the demographic divide and the only decade of decline), steady (1921–1951), rapid growth or population explosion (1951–1981), and high growth with clear signs of slowing (after 1981). A falling growth rate can still add enormous numbers, because it is a share of a huge base.
The four phases were driven by two rates. The death rate fell first and fast; the birth rate fell later. So the natural-increase gap between them first widened (the explosion) and then narrowed, to about 14.7 per 1,000 by 2001–2011.
The national growth rate of 17.64 per cent (2001–2011) hides sharp regional differences — from Nagaland (−0.47 per cent) and Kerala (4.86) to Meghalaya (27.82) and Bihar (25.07). Slow growth follows a low birth rate, while migration drove the fastest growth in a few small union territories.
Rapid growth strains both livelihoods (food, housing, water, schooling, work) and the environment (forests, soil, water, minerals). But damage depends on consumption and management, not numbers alone. The response is planned, sustainable development that keeps the ecological balance.
Flowchart
Fig. 7.11-1 Caption: The chapter in one chain — a census counts the people, then asks where they are and how their numbers change. Nodes: The census counts every person once, each ten years → it answers two questions. Question 1 — where are the people? → distribution is very uneven (five states hold half) → density measures people per unit area (arithmetic, physiological, agricultural) → the pattern is shaped by landforms, climate, accessibility and level of development, acting together. Question 2 — how do the numbers change? → birth rate minus death rate gives natural growth, and migration in or out gives migratory growth → together they drive total growth → four phases: stagnant (1901–1921) → steady (1921–1951) → rapid explosion (1951–1981) → high but slowing (1981–2011) → growth is uneven across states → rapid growth strains development and the environment → the response is planned, sustainable development.
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
A national average — of density, of growth, or of a vital rate — describes the country and almost no state within it, and each average in turn hides the districts and villages inside it.
A decadal figure smooths over the years in between, and the 2011 count is now more than a decade old, so every recent national total is an estimate rather than a fresh count.
Density spread over all land is not the true pressure on the land that feeds people, and the distribution map shows only where people are, never why any one family came to be there.
7.12 Key Terms
accessibility — how easily a place can be reached, by water, road or rail.
agricultural density — the agricultural population divided by the net cultivable area.
arithmetic density — the total population divided by the total area, in persons per square kilometre.
birth rate — the number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people.
census — a complete count of everyone in a defined area at one point in time, with their basic details.
crore — ten million (1,00,00,000).
death rate — the number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people.
demographic divide — a year that separates two eras of a country’s population history; in India, 1921, 1951 and 1981.
demographic transition — the shift a population makes from high birth and death rates to low ones, passing through a phase of rapid growth.
density of population — the number of people living on each unit of area.
distribution — the way people are spread across space: where they gather and where they are scarce.
ecological balance — a state in which the use of resources leaves the environment able to recover and support life.
ecological imbalance — the disturbance of that balance when human demand degrades the environment.
fertility-induced growth — rapid growth driven by a still-high birth rate sitting on top of a low death rate.
index of concentration — the share of India’s total population that lives in one state or union territory, as a percentage.
lakh — one hundred thousand (1,00,000).
migratory growth — change in a population caused by people moving in or out.
mortality-induced growth — growth driven mainly by a fall in the death rate while births stay high.
natural growth — the difference between the birth rate and the death rate; also called natural increase.
negative growth — a fall in population, when deaths outnumber births or more people leave than arrive.
physiological density — the total population divided by the net cultivated area.
population — the total number of people living in a defined area at a given time.
population growth rate — the change in population between two points in time, as a percentage of the starting figure.
positive growth — a rise in population, when births outnumber deaths or more people arrive than leave.
sustainable development — meeting present needs without destroying the ability of future generations to meet their own.
urbanisation — the growing share of people who live in towns and cities.
7.13 Points to Ponder
India’s density is 382 people per square kilometre, yet no real place feels like exactly that. If every district is either more or less crowded than the national figure, what is an average density actually good for?
Physiological density measures people against cropland, not against all land. As cities spread over farmland, that density can rise even when the population does not. Does that mean the country is getting more crowded, or less?
India’s growth rate has been falling since 1971, while its total keeps climbing. Which is the more honest headline about India’s population — the rate or the total — and honest about what, exactly?
The Ganga plain is crowded because of level land, fertile soil and reliable water acting together, and it might empty if any one of them were missing. When a population depends on several conditions at once, is it meaningful to ask which one ‘caused’ the crowd?
Two states at different points in the demographic transition reach the same national policy at different moments in their own history. Should a country plan for its average, or for its extremes?
The chapter treats population as a reality to be planned for rather than a problem to be feared. When does calling people a ‘burden’ on resources shade into blaming them for the shortage — and how would you tell the two apart?
7.14 Objective Questions
- India’s population is about what share of the world’s total? [1 mark]
- 2.4 per cent
- 4.5 per cent
- 17.5 per cent
- 24 per cent
- Which state had the highest index of concentration of population according to the 2011 Census? [1 mark]
- Maharashtra
- Bihar
- Uttar Pradesh
- West Bengal
- Which year is called the demographic divide in India’s population history? [1 mark]
- 1901
- 1921
- 1951
- 1981
- Assertion (A): India’s physiological density is higher than its arithmetic density. Reason (R): Physiological density divides the population by the net cultivated area, which is smaller than the total area. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): India added more than 181 million people between 2001 and 2011, even though its growth rate was the lowest since 1951. Reason (R): A small percentage of a very large population is still a large number of people. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Match each term in Column A with its meaning in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Arithmetic density | i. births minus deaths |
| b. Physiological density | ii. population per unit of total area |
| c. Index of concentration | iii. a state’s share of India’s total population |
| d. Natural growth | iv. population per unit of net cultivated area |
Fill in the blank: According to the 2011 Census, the Indian state with the lowest density of population was __________. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: A census counts only a sample of the population and estimates the rest. [1 mark]
7.15 Check Your Concepts
Define the density of population, and state India’s arithmetic density according to the 2011 Census. [2 marks]
Define the index of concentration of population. [2 marks]
Differentiate between the distribution and the density of population. [3 marks]
Differentiate between natural growth and migratory growth of population. [3 marks]
Why is 1921 called the demographic divide in India’s population history? Explain briefly. [3 marks]
Explain, using the Ganga plain as an example, why some regions of India are far more densely populated than others. [4 marks]
“A single density figure for a whole state can hide as much as it reveals.” Evaluate this claim. [4 marks]
Describe the four phases of India’s population growth since 1901, and explain what drove the shift from one phase to the next. [6 marks]
Discuss the impact of rapid population growth on India’s development and on its environment, with examples from India. [6 marks]
7.16 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
On an outline map of India, mark and label the following, using the 2011 Census: (a) the state with the highest density of population; (b) the state with the lowest density of population; (c) one region of dense population lying south of the Tropic of Cancer; (d) one region of sparse population. [4 marks]
West Bengal’s population was about 80.18 million in 2001 and about 91.35 million in 2011. (i) Using the growth-rate formula from the chapter, calculate the state’s decadal growth rate for 2001–11, showing your working. (ii) State one thing this single figure does not tell you about population change within the state. [4 marks]
Study Fig. 7.7-2, the decadal growth-rate curve. (i) In which decade did India’s growth rate reach its peak, and what was that rate? (ii) The line falls after that peak — does a falling line mean India’s population itself was falling? Explain. (iii) State one thing this graph does not tell you about where the growth took place. [4 marks]
Study Table 7.1, the share of India’s area and population for selected states. (i) Name a state that holds a much larger share of area than of population. (ii) Name a state where the opposite is true. (iii) What does this mismatch tell you about the link between the size of a state and the number of people it holds? [3 marks]