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Chapter 9: Demographic Attributes

On a February morning in 2011, a schoolteacher in a small town set out with a satchel of printed forms and a task that would repeat, house by house, across the whole country. She was one of some 2.7 million enumerators fanning out for the Census of India — the largest headcount ever attempted anywhere in the world.

At each door the questions were plain. How many people live here? What is each person’s age? Male or female? Can each read and write a simple message? What work, if any, does each person do? An old man’s answer, a newborn’s entry, a woman’s occupation left blank — every one became a single mark on a single sheet.

Those marks, gathered from more than 240 million households, were added up. Out of them came a portrait of a nation: 1.21 billion people; about 69 in every 100 living in villages; roughly 943 women for every 1,000 men; a population still strikingly young; and just under four in ten counted as workers.

None of these figures existed until the counting was done. A census does not describe the country first and measure it afterwards — the measuring is how the country comes to be described at all. Every table, map and graph in this chapter rests on that patient, door-to-door arithmetic.

Diagram

Fig. 9.0-1 Caption: Each answer on the census schedule feeds one of the four attributes this chapter studies. Brief: Draw a household doorway on the left with an enumerator holding a filled census schedule. From the schedule, four labelled arrows fan out to the right, each pointing to a small panel — Residence (village or town), Sex (male or female), Age (years completed), and Work and literacy (can read and write; kind of work). Arrows point outward from the schedule to the four panels. Keep it a simple line diagram, no shading, no real faces.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. India counted 1.21 billion people in 2011, yet only about 31 in every 100 lived in a town or city. Why does such a vast country still live mostly in villages? Q2. The same census found fewer women than men — about 943 women for every 1,000 men. What pushes this number below 1,000, and why is it far lower in some states than in others? Q3. Why do geographers call India’s population ‘young’, and what will change as that shape grows older over the coming decades? Q4. Nearly three-quarters of Indians aged seven and above could read and write in 2011, up from about five in a hundred a century earlier. What made that climb so slow at first and so fast later? Q5. Fewer than four in ten Indians were counted as workers in 2011. Does that mean the other six in ten do nothing — and why are so few women recorded as workers?

This chapter will let you answer each of these by the time you reach its end.

9.1 What Demographic Attributes Are

A population is never just a number. Behind the total of 1.21 billion people counted in India in 2011 sits a second, harder question: who are these people? Where do they live, how old are they, are they men or women, can they read, and do they work? The answers describe the make-up of the population, not merely its size.

These characteristics of make-up are called demographic attributes — the features that describe the composition of a population, such as its division between village and town, between males and females, between young and old, between the literate and the illiterate, and between workers and non-workers. Composition here means the internal structure of a population: what kinds of people it is made of, and in what proportions.

It helps to keep composition apart from two things studied earlier — the size of a population (how many people) and its growth (how fast the number changes). Size and growth answer ‘how many’; composition answers ‘of what kind’. Two districts with the same total population can be worlds apart if one is mostly young and rural and the other mostly ageing and urban.

Composition is what turns a headcount into useful knowledge. A state that is overwhelmingly young needs schools and, soon after, jobs; one that is ageing needs pensions and hospitals. A district where women outnumber men has a different social shape from one where men are in surplus. Planning of any kind begins by asking not how large a population is, but how it is composed.

The Census As The Instrument

Every one of these attributes is measured by the same instrument: the census, the complete official count of a country’s population, taken on a fixed date and recording set details for every person. India has held a census roughly every ten years since 1872; the most recent completed count, to which almost every figure in this chapter refers, is the Census of India 2011.

The census matters because it is the only source that reaches every household rather than a sample. When it records residence, sex, age, literacy and work for each person, it lets us build the exact proportions — the composition — that the rest of this chapter reads. Four attributes are examined in turn: the rural–urban balance, sex composition, age composition, literacy, and the working population.

The Census Count Evidence: Every decade, enumerators visit each household and record set questions on one reference date — 1 March for the 2011 count. Reasoning: Adding the individual entries gives totals and shares for the whole country, each state and each district. Limit: A count taken once in ten years cannot show change within the decade, and a household missed is simply absent from the figures.

The Two Phases Of A Census The Indian census is not done in a single visit. It runs in two phases. In the first, houselisting, enumerators list every building and dwelling and note its amenities. In the second, population enumeration, they return to record each person — name, age, sex, residence, literacy, work and much else — against a fixed reference date. Only after both phases are complete, checked and tabulated do the national and state figures appear, first as provisional totals and later as final data. This is why the numbers a student meets sometimes differ slightly between an early release and the final volumes: they come from the same count at different stages of tabulation.

9.2 Rural And Urban Composition

9.2.1 Defining Rural And Urban Population

The first way the census sorts people is by where they live. The part of the population living in villages is the rural population; the part living in towns and cities is the urban population. The line between them is not left to impression — the census draws it by rule.

A settlement is counted as urban if it meets either of two tests. The first is legal: any place with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area is a statutory town, urban by law whatever its size. The second is functional: a place with no such body still counts as a census town if it satisfies three conditions together — a population of at least 5,000, a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre (that is, at least 400 people living in each square kilometre), and at least three-quarters of its male main workers employed outside agriculture. Every settlement that passes neither test is rural.

In everyday speech the word village is loose, but to the census it is a revenue unit — a recorded piece of administered land. The habitat within it may be a scatter of tiny hamlets of thirty or forty people, or a large village of several thousand. What binds all rural settlements together is a shared dependence on agriculture and allied activities.

Rural and urban populations differ in more than address. Rural people draw their living largely from primary activities such as farming; urban people from secondary and tertiary activities such as manufacturing, trade, transport and services. The pace of rural life is slower and social ties are close and personal, while urban life is faster and its relations more formal. Cities also carry their own burdens — housing shortages, strain on water and sanitation, congestion and pollution — that thinly settled villages do not. The two are not better and worse, only differently made.

9.2.2 The Rural–Urban Balance And Its Trend

Measured by these rules, India is still overwhelmingly a country of villages. In 2011, 68.84 per cent of the population lived in rural areas and 31.16 per cent in urban areas. Roughly seven Indians in ten were villagers.

Yet the urban minority is enormous in absolute terms. India’s urban population in 2011 stood at about 377 million — larger than the entire population of the United States at that time. The rural population, at about 833 million, is simply vaster still. A small share of a very large total is a very large number.

The urban share has climbed the whole way through the twentieth century, but unevenly. It crept upward until 1941, reaching only 13.86 per cent, then rose more sharply — to 17.29 per cent by 1951 and on to 31.16 per cent by 2011. Across the same span the urban population grew about fifteen-fold, from 25.85 million in 1901, driven in large part by people moving from villages to towns.

Graph

Fig. 9.2-1 Caption: The urban share of India’s population climbed slowly to 1941, then faster, reaching about 31 per cent by 2011. Brief: Line graph. X-axis: census years 1901 to 2011 at each decade. Y-axis: percentage of total population living in urban areas (%), scale 0 to 35. Plot one line through: 1901 = 10.84, 1911 = 10.29, 1921 = 11.17, 1931 = 11.99, 1941 = 13.86, 1951 = 17.29, 1961 = 17.97, 1971 = 19.90, 1981 = 23.31, 1991 = 25.72, 2001 = 27.78, 2011 = 31.16. Mark the change of slope between 1941 and 1951. Source: Census of India, 1901–2011.

Behind the national average lie wide gaps between states. Himachal Pradesh, a northern hill state, was the most rural in 2011, with 89.96 per cent of its people in villages. At the other end, the union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh were barely rural at all — under three per cent. In sheer numbers, Uttar Pradesh held the largest rural population of any state, about 155 million people, more than a sixth of all rural India.

A high rural share tells us something about an economy. It usually means the population is still tied to the land, with industry and services too thin to draw large numbers into towns. This is the situation across much of the agrarian heartland and the hilly, forested tracts of the north and north-east, where both economic development and urban growth have been slow.

Q1. India counted 1.21 billion people in 2011, yet only about 31 in every 100 lived in a town or city. Why does such a vast country still live mostly in villages?

A. Because India’s economy is still largely agrarian. Where farming dominates livelihoods — as in Bihar, Odisha and Rajasthan — industry and services have not grown enough to pull large numbers into towns, so most people remain tied to the land in villages.

9.2.3 Urbanisation And Its Pattern

The steady rise of the urban share is the visible face of a process called urbanisation — the transformation of a society from predominantly rural to predominantly urban. It has two sides at once: a growing number of people living in urban settlements, and a growing share of people earning their living from non-agricultural work. A place does not become urban merely by adding people; it becomes urban when its people stop farming and start manufacturing, trading and serving.

The level of urbanisation varies sharply across the country. Goa, a small western coastal state, was the most urbanised state in 2011, with 62.17 per cent of its people in towns. Among the larger states, Tamil Nadu led at 48.45 per cent, followed by Kerala (47.72), Maharashtra (45.23), Gujarat (42.58), Karnataka (38.57) and Punjab (37.49) — each with over a third of its population urban. Himachal Pradesh, the most rural state, was also the least urbanised, with only about a tenth of its people in towns.

Table 9.1 — Most And Least Urbanised States, 2011 (per cent of population living in urban areas) | State | Urban population (%) | |—|—| | India | 31.16 | | Goa | 62.17 | | Tamil Nadu | 48.45 | | Kerala | 47.72 | | Maharashtra | 45.23 | | Gujarat | 42.58 | | Odisha | 16.68 | | Assam | 14.08 | | Bihar | 11.30 | | Himachal Pradesh | 10.04 |

The pattern on the ground is clear enough to map. India’s urban population also clusters: more than half of it lives in just five states — Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is the telling case. It is one of India’s least urbanised states by percentage, yet because it is so populous its absolute urban population is one of the largest in the country. Share and number, once again, tell different stories.

Map

Map 9.1 Caption: The level of urbanisation is highest in the south, the western coast and the metropolitan cores, and lowest in the hills and the eastern plains, 2011. Brief: Choropleth map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Shade each state and union territory by urban population as a percentage of its total population, in four classes: below 20; 20.01–30; 30.01–40; above 40. Label the most and least urbanised states named in the text. Include a legend and a scale bar. Use boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India; do not show any area as disputed. Do not add data not stated in the text.

Map 9.1 Darker shading means a higher urban share. The pattern: urbanisation is high in the south, the western coast and the metro cores, low in the hills and the eastern plains. Its limit is scale — one figure covers a whole state, so a heavily urban district and an almost wholly rural one can average out to the state’s middle shade.

Why is the map shaded this way? Because urbanisation follows the economy. Where farming still dominates, few towns grow, and the population stays in villages.

A Rural Economy Stays Rural Economy still farm-dependent → little secondary or tertiary work is created → few towns grow → most people stay in villages → urbanisation stays slow → the thin urban market gives industry weak reason to arrive.

Find your own district on a state map and decide, from what you see and know, whether most people around you live in villages or towns. Then check the census figure for your district and see whether your impression matches the number.

9.3 Sex Composition

9.3.1 The Sex Ratio And How It Is Measured

The second attribute the census records is sex — whether each person is male or female. The balance between the two is captured in a single figure, the sex ratio, defined as the number of females per 1,000 males in a population.

\[\text{Sex ratio} = \frac{\text{Number of females}}{\text{Number of males}} \times 1000 \quad (\text{females per 1000 males})\]

A sex ratio of exactly 1,000 means perfect parity — an equal number of each. A figure above 1,000 means females outnumber males; a figure below 1,000 means there are fewer females than males, a female deficit. For India in 2011 the overall sex ratio was 943. With about 623 million males and 588 million females counted, the arithmetic runs:

\[\frac{588\ \text{million}}{623\ \text{million}} \times 1000 \approx 943\ \text{females per 1000 males}\]

That figure of 943 means the country had markedly fewer women than men.

Demographers also watch a sharper version of the same measure. The child sex ratio counts females per 1,000 males in the 0–6 age group alone. Because it is free of the effects of migration and of longer female life expectancy, it reflects most directly how young girls fare. In 2011 the child sex ratio was 919 — lower than the overall figure, and lower than it had been in 2001. A deficit that is worse among the very young is a warning about the future.

9.3.2 The Trend Of Sex Ratio In India

India’s sex ratio has fallen through most of the century for which it has been counted. It stood at 972 in 1901, slipped to 946 by 1951, and reached its lowest point of 927 in 1991. It has recovered a little since — to 933 in 2001 and 943 in 2011 — but remains well below parity.

Graph

Fig. 9.3-1 Caption: India’s sex ratio fell through most of the twentieth century, reached its lowest in 1991, then recovered slightly to 943 by 2011. Brief: Line graph. X-axis: census years 1901 to 2011 at each decade. Y-axis: females per 1,000 males, scale 900 to 980. Plot one line through: 1901 = 972, 1911 = 964, 1921 = 955, 1931 = 950, 1941 = 945, 1951 = 946, 1961 = 941, 1971 = 930, 1981 = 934, 1991 = 927, 2001 = 933, 2011 = 943. Mark the 1991 low point. Source: Census of India, 1901–2011 (2011 final figures).

Everywhere in the world slightly more boys are born than girls — at birth the natural balance is about 105 boys for every 100 girls, a mild male surplus that biology alone produces. India’s deficit, however, is far larger than this, and it does not close as a generation ages. That gap points not to biology but to how girls and women are treated.

The documented factors are several, and they act together. A strong preference for sons leads to the neglect of the girl child in food, health care and schooling, so that more girls than boys die young. Women face risk during childbirth, keeping female mortality high through the reproductive years. Where a small-family norm meets son preference, couples may stop at a son or resort to determining and selecting the sex of a child before birth — practices that are illegal in India but not extinct. None of these is a single villain; the female deficit is the sum of many pressures.

That The Female Deficit Is Made, Not Natural Evidence: At birth the natural balance is about 105 boys per 100 girls; India’s shortfall, and its falling child sex ratio, run well past that. Reasoning: A deficit larger than the birth ratio, concentrated in certain regions and worst among the very young, points to human causes, not biology. Limit: The census counts outcomes, not intentions — it shows the deficit but cannot, by itself, name the cause in any single case.

9.3.3 The Spatial Pattern Of Sex Ratio

The national figure of 943 is only an average, and it hides a wide spread. Kerala, in the far south, was the only state above parity in 2011, at 1,084 females per 1,000 males; among the union territories, Puducherry also crossed 1,000, at 1,038. At the other extreme, Daman and Diu recorded the lowest figure in the country, 618, with Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Chandigarh and Haryana also far below the national average.

Map

Map 9.2 Caption: The sex ratio favours females only in the far south, and falls to a deep deficit in the north-west and in some union territories, 2011. Brief: Choropleth map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Shade states and union territories by sex ratio (females per 1,000 males) in classes: 900 and below; 901–925; 926–950; 951–975; 976–1000; 1001 and above. Label Kerala (highest), Daman and Diu (lowest) and the low north-western cluster. Include a legend and a scale bar. Use boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India; do not show any area as disputed.

Map 9.2 Darker shading means more females per 1,000 males. The pattern: above parity only in the far south, a favourable belt through the south and east, and a deep deficit across the north-west and some union territories. Its limit is that the map cannot separate its two causes — social treatment of girls and the effect of migration both leave the same shade.

Two very different forces shape this map. The first is social: son preference is strongest in the north-western belt — Haryana, Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan — where clusters of districts sit well below the national average, while much of the south and east lies above it. The second is migration, which distorts the ratio at both ends.

Worked Case 9.1 — The Two Ends Of Migration The situation: Long-distance labour migration in India is largely male. Men leave some regions for work and gather in others, while women stay behind or move less. The working: Men out-migrate from the sub-Himalayan states — Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir — leaving a female surplus that raises the sex ratio in these origin areas. At the destination end, cities and industrial union territories such as Delhi and Chandigarh gain a male surplus as male workers arrive without their families, pulling the sex ratio down. The mining and industrial state of Chhattisgarh shows the origin effect; the two capital-region territories show the destination effect.

So a state’s sex ratio is not a simple report card on how it treats its girls. It also records who has left and who has arrived: the same low figure in Delhi and in a north-western district can spring from different causes — male in-migration in one, son preference in the other. Reading the sex ratio well means holding both explanations in mind at once.

Q2. The same census found fewer women than men — about 943 women for every 1,000 men. What pushes this number below 1,000, and why is it far lower in some states than in others?

A. A mix of son preference, neglect of the girl child and sex-selective practices leaves fewer females. It is lowest in the north-west, where son preference runs strongest, and in cities that draw mainly male migrants for work.

9.4 Age Composition

9.4.1 The Three Broad Age Groups

The third attribute is age. The census sorts the whole population into three broad groups: the young, aged up to 15 years; the adults, aged 15 to 59 years; and the old, aged 60 years and above. The middle group is often called the working age group, because it holds the people old enough and young enough to do most of the economy’s work.

The two outer groups form the dependent population — the young, who are still too small to work, and the old, who have largely left work. Both depend for their support on the working-age group in the middle. The young are economically unproductive because they are being fed, raised and schooled; the old because most have retired from productive activity.

The balance between these groups is summed up by the dependency ratio — the number of dependents for every 100 people of working age.

\[\text{Dependency ratio} = \frac{\text{Population aged 0-14} + \text{Population aged 60 and above}}{\text{Population aged 15-59}} \times 100\]

A high dependency ratio means each worker supports many non-workers; a low one means the burden is lighter.

India’s own structure makes the ratio high. In 2011 over 30 per cent of the population were young, about three-fifths were of working age, and under a tenth — roughly 8.6 per cent — were elderly. Using these approximate shares, the dependency ratio works out at about

\[\frac{31 + 9}{60} \times 100 \approx 67 \text{ dependents per 100 working-age persons.}\]

This large young share is exactly why India is called a young population: in most developed countries the young make up under a quarter of the total, but in India they exceed 30 per cent. The reason is a birth rate that stayed high while child deaths fell — many children born, and more of them surviving.

The middle group carries the rest. The working-age population is biologically the most reproductive, economically the most active and geographically the most mobile — it is the group that farms, manufactures, trades, migrates and, in doing so, supports both the children below it and the elderly above it.

Q3. Why do geographers call India’s population ‘young’, and what will change as that shape grows older over the coming decades?

A. Because over 30 per cent are children and adolescents while under a tenth are elderly. As the population ages, this bulge climbs: a very large workforce around mid-century, then, by the century’s end, far more elderly and a much heavier old-age dependency.

The dependency ratio is not the same everywhere. It runs higher in villages than in cities, and for a reason worth spelling out.

Why Villages Carry More Dependents Higher rural birth rates → more children in each household → working-age adults leave for city jobs → villages are left with a larger share of young and old → the rural dependency ratio rises above the urban.

9.4.2 Reading The Age–Sex Pyramid

Age and sex are best seen together, and the tool for that is the age–sex pyramid, also called the population pyramid — a diagram that stacks the age groups up a vertical axis, youngest at the base and oldest at the apex, with the share of males drawn to the left of the axis and the share of females to the right. Because each successive age group is usually smaller than the one below it, the stacked bars taper upward into the shape of a pyramid, which is how the diagram gets its name.

The shape carries meaning. A broad base means many children — a high birth rate and a young, growing population. A base that is narrower than the bars above it means birth rates are falling. A bulge that sits high up means the population is ageing. Reading the pyramid is a way of reading a population’s whole life story at a glance.

That shape can be pushed out of its smooth form by events. Wars kill many young men and later depress births; epidemics and famines carve notches into the affected age groups, as the deaths of the COVID-19 years did in many countries; migration, always selective by age and sex, thins some bars and swells others; and population policies, whether they aim to slow births or encourage them, leave their mark decades later.

India’s pyramid is not standing still. Projections drawn for 2020, 2050 and 2100 show the widest part climbing steadily up the diagram.

Graph

Fig. 9.4-1 Caption: India’s age–sex structure projected for 2020, 2050 and 2100: the bulge of population climbs from the young towards the old. Brief: Three population pyramids side by side, labelled 2020, 2050 and 2100. In each, horizontal bars run in five-year age groups from 0–4 at the base to 100+ at the apex; males to the left of a central axis, females to the right; x-axis = share of total population (%), y-axis = age group. In 2020 the widest bars are at ages 10–30 (a broad base). In 2050 the widest bars shift to 40–60. In 2100 the widest bars shift to 60–75, with a narrowing base. Source: United Nations population projections for India. Show that these are projections, not counts.

Fig. 9.4-1 Each bar’s length is that age group’s share of the population; males sit left, females right, youngest at the base. The pattern: the widest part climbs from base (2020) to middle (2050) to top (2100). Its limit is that these are projections, not counts — they assume birth and death rates follow expected trends and could be thrown off by events.

The message of the three pyramids is a sequence, not a snapshot. In 2020 the bulge sits among the young, so India still adds workers each year. By about 2050 the bulge reaches the working ages, giving the country an unusually large workforce — a window sometimes called the demographic dividend. By 2100 the bulge has climbed into old age, so a large share of Indians will be elderly and economically dependent. The same population that is young today is on course to grow old, and the dependency it carries will shift from the base of the pyramid to its top.

9.5 Literacy

9.5.1 Who Counts As Literate

The fourth attribute is literacy. The census treats a person as literate if they can both read and write a simple message with understanding, in any language. Reading alone is not enough, and writing alone is not enough; the two must go together, and the person must grasp what is read.

The definition is deliberately generous in one way and firm in another. No formal schooling is required — literacy can be gained through adult-literacy classes or non-formal education, and a blind person who can read and write in Braille is counted as literate. But since the 1991 census, all children in the 0–6 age group are treated as illiterate by definition, because they are too young to be expected to read. For this reason literacy is measured only for the population aged seven years and above.

9.5.2 Crude And Effective Literacy Rate

A literacy rate is simply the number of literate persons for every 100 people, expressed as a percentage. But there are two ways to work it out, and they give different answers.

Up to the 1981 census, literacy was measured as the crude literacy rate — literate persons as a share of the whole population, children included.

\[\text{Crude literacy rate} = \frac{\text{Literate population}}{\text{Total population}} \times 100\]

This is unfair to the population, because it counts against it the very young children who cannot yet be expected to read. From 1991 the census switched to the effective literacy rate, which excludes the 0–6 group and measures literacy only among those aged seven and above.

\[\text{Effective literacy rate} = \frac{\text{Literate population aged 7 and above}}{\text{Population aged 7 and above}} \times 100\]

The difference is real. For 2011 India’s crude literacy rate was about 64 per cent, but its effective literacy rate was 74.04 per cent. The same country looks more literate once the children who could not possibly read are set aside — which is why the effective rate is the truer measure, and the one now used.

9.5.3 The Trend Of Literacy In India

Literacy in India began the twentieth century at a desperately low level. In 1901 the crude literacy rate was just 5.35 per cent — only about five people in a hundred could read and write, and female literacy stood at a bare 0.60 per cent.

Progress was sluggish at first. Literacy stayed in single digits until 1931, then rose more briskly, gaining 6.6 percentage points in the decade to 1941. The following decade almost stalled — a gain of only about half a point to 1951 — as the upheaval of Partition took its toll. After independence the rise became rapid: the crude literacy rate more than tripled, from 16.67 per cent in 1951 to 64.32 per cent in 2011.

Graph

Fig. 9.5-1 Caption: India’s crude literacy rate crawled for the first half-century, then climbed steeply after independence, 1901–2011. Brief: Line graph. X-axis: census years 1901 to 2011 at each decade. Y-axis: crude literacy rate (%), scale 0 to 70. Plot one line through: 1901 = 5.35, 1911 = 5.92, 1921 = 7.16, 1931 = 9.50, 1941 = 16.10, 1951 = 16.67, 1961 = 24.02, 1971 = 29.45, 1981 = 36.23, 1991 = 42.84, 2001 = 54.51, 2011 = 64.32. Mark the near-flat stretch between 1941 and 1951. Source: Census of India, 1901–2011.

Q4. Nearly three-quarters of Indians aged seven and above could read and write in 2011, up from about five in a hundred a century earlier. What made that climb so slow at first and so fast later?

A. Under colonial rule schooling reached very few, and female literacy was near zero, so progress crawled. After independence India built schools, ran adult-literacy drives and pushed universal elementary schooling, so literacy more than tripled between 1951 and 2011.

A rising percentage can hide a stubborn fact: because the population itself keeps growing, the number of illiterates can climb even while the rate improves. The turning point came only in the 1991–2001 decade, when the absolute number of illiterates finally fell — from about 32.82 crore in 1991 to about 26.62 crore in 2001. That decade is called the ‘Literacy Decade’ because, for the first time since independence, India was not just growing more literate in proportion but shrinking the actual crowd of people who could not read.

Behind the national figure lies a persistent gap between the sexes. In 2011 male effective literacy was 82.14 per cent and female literacy 65.46 per cent — a gap of 16.68 points. The gap has been narrowing, but it is still wide, and it is widest exactly where overall literacy is lowest.

9.5.4 The Spatial Pattern Of Literacy

Literacy varies as sharply across space as it does across the sexes. Kerala led the country in 2011 with a literacy rate of 93.91 per cent, its female literacy close behind its male; Mizoram, in the north-east, followed at 91.58 per cent, and among the union territories Lakshadweep reached 92.28 per cent. At the other end, Bihar had the lowest literacy rate of any state, and its female literacy was the lowest of all.

Table 9.2 — Most And Least Literate States, 2011 (effective literacy rate, per cent) | State | Literacy rate (%) | |—|—| | India | 74.04 | | Kerala | 93.91 | | Mizoram | 91.58 | | Tripura | 87.75 | | Goa | 87.40 | | Rajasthan | 67.06 | | Arunachal Pradesh | 66.95 | | Bihar | 63.82 |

The states that fall below the national average of 74.04 per cent form a broad band across the middle and margins of the country — Jammu and Kashmir in the north, Rajasthan in the west, Andhra Pradesh in the south, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the centre, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha in the east, and Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Meghalaya in the north-east.

Map

Map 9.3 Caption: Literacy is highest in the south, the western coast and parts of the north-east, and lowest in a central-eastern belt, 2011. Brief: Choropleth map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Shade states and union territories by effective literacy rate in classes: 70.00 and below; 70.01–80.00; 80.01–90.00; 90.01 and above. Label Kerala (highest) and Bihar (lowest). Include a legend and a scale bar. Use boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India; do not show any area as disputed.

Map 9.3 Darker shading means higher literacy. The pattern: high in the south, the western coast and parts of the north-east; low across a central-eastern belt. Its limit is scale — a single state figure hides the districts inside it, so even a highly literate state can contain pockets where few people can read.

Why does Kerala sit so far ahead? Not by accident of nature, but by a long history of schooling.

Kerala’s High Literacy Factors: a long history of public schooling, social-reform movements, and near-universal female literacy. The decisive one: sustained investment in schooling — especially the schooling of girls — begun well before independence. Move it: strip out that schooling history and high female enrolment, and Kerala’s literacy would sit near the national middle, not at the very top.

9.6 Working Population

9.6.1 Participation Rate, Main And Marginal Workers

The last attribute is work. It is the working population, not the total population, that actually produces goods and services; the rest depend on it. So the census asks of each person a simple question — do you work? — and sorts the answers with care.

A worker is a person engaged in economically productive, gainful work. Everyone else is a non-worker — children, full-time students, those who keep house, the elderly and the ill, who do no economically productive work and depend on those who do. The share of workers in the whole population is captured by the work participation rate.

\[\text{Work participation rate} = \frac{\text{Total workers}}{\text{Total population}} \times 100\]

Workers themselves are split by how much of the year they worked. A main worker is one who worked for the major part of the reference period — six months, or 183 days, or more, in the year. A marginal worker is one who worked for less than that, often seasonally or occasionally. The distinction matters: a region full of marginal workers is one where steady, year-round work is scarce.

The working ages are usually taken as 15 to 59 years. But this is a norm, not a wall. Under hardship, children below 15 and the elderly above 60 are drawn into work as well, and the census records them where it finds them.

9.6.2 The Pattern Of Work Participation

By this definition India’s work participation rate in 2011 was 39.8 per cent. That means nearly three Indians in five were non-workers, supported by the two in five who worked — a mark of an economy where dependency is heavy.

The rate splits sharply by sex. The male participation rate was 51.7 per cent, but the female rate only 25.6 per cent — barely half the male figure. This gap widens further from village to city. In rural areas about 31 per cent of women were recorded as workers; in urban areas the figure fell to about 11 per cent. Women’s recorded work all but disappears in the cities.

That last fact is a warning to read the figure carefully, because much of what women do is never counted at all.

What The Female Work Rate Leaves Out Evidence: Rural female participation (about 31 per cent) is nearly three times the urban (about 11 per cent), and much of women’s rural work is unpaid help on family farms. Reasoning: The census counts only work judged economically productive; unpaid household work and much unpaid farm work fall outside that line, so they go unrecorded. Limit: The count shows who was recorded as a worker, not who actually worked — a low female rate mixes real barriers with what the definition omits.

Q5. Fewer than four in ten Indians were counted as workers in 2011. Does that mean the other six in ten do nothing — and why are so few women recorded as workers?

A. No — most of the rest are children, students, homemakers and the elderly, who depend on workers. Women are under-recorded partly because much of their unpaid farm and home work is not counted as economic activity, and partly because of real barriers to paid work.

Participation also varies widely across the map. The male rate is very high in the tribal states of the north-east — over half the male population works in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Nagaland — where whole families take part in cultivation. Female participation, too, is high in these tribal areas. It is lowest in the agriculturally prosperous north-west, in Punjab and Haryana, and in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Odisha, where only a small share of women is returned as working. Where farm households are better off, fewer women are recorded in the fields — a pattern that again reflects both real change and what the count chooses to see.

9.6.3 Occupational Structure

Knowing how many people work is only half the picture; the other half is what they do. The census classifies every worker by occupation. Since the 1981 count it has used four main categories, and the 2011 census keeps them.

Flowchart

Fig. 9.6-1 Caption: How the census sorts each person by work. Nodes: Person counted → did economically productive work during the year? no → non-worker; yes → worker → worked for 6 months (183 days) or more? yes → main worker; no → marginal worker → every worker is also placed in one occupation → cultivator; agricultural labourer; household industry worker; other worker.

A cultivator works land that the household owns or holds; an agricultural labourer works for wages on land owned by others; a household industry worker makes goods within the home; and ‘other workers’ covers everything else — factory work, trade, transport, teaching, office work and the rest.

Table 9.3 — Occupational Structure Of Workers, 2011 (per cent of total workers) | Category | Share of workers (%) | |—|—| | Cultivators | 24.6 | | Agricultural labourers | 30.0 | | Household industry workers | 3.8 | | Other workers | 41.6 |

Table 9.3 Each figure is that category’s share of all workers. The pattern: cultivators and agricultural labourers together (over half) show that farming still employs the most people, yet ‘other workers’ is now the single largest category. Its limit is that a share counts who works, not how well — it cannot show whether the work is full-time, secure or productive.

The table tells a two-sided story. Farming still dominates: cultivators and agricultural labourers together make up well over half of all workers, and in rural India alone about four-fifths of the work-force is in agriculture. Yet the largest single category is now ‘other workers’ — the workers in industry, trade and services — which is the sign of an economy slowly diversifying away from the land. The occupational structure, like the work participation rate, shows a country still rooted in farming but beginning to move.

9.7 Implications For Development

The four attributes of this chapter are not merely a description of the population. Taken together, they are among the primary indicators of a country’s economic progress and social wellbeing. Where people live, whether the sexes are in balance, how old the population is, how many can read and how many work — each says something about how developed a society is, and each points to what its development must next attend to.

What Composition Demands Of Development

The rural–urban balance sets the first task. A population that is still two-thirds rural and rooted in agriculture needs development to reach the village — better farm productivity, and the schools, clinics, water and roads that villages often lack. At the same time the fast, and sometimes disorderly, growth of towns brings its own demands: housing, sanitation and services that cities struggle to supply, leaving slums and strain where planning falls behind. Development has to work at both ends of the same shift.

Sex composition carries a demand that is partly moral and partly practical. A persistent female deficit is itself a failure of development, because it records the unequal treatment of girls and women. A balanced sex ratio, and the improving status of women that underlies it, are at once a goal of development and a measure of it. This is why the census keeps male and female data apart: planning for health, schooling and employment cannot be done well for a population treated as one undivided mass.

Age composition offers the sharpest opportunity — and the sharpest risk. India’s large young and working-age share opens a window in which the country has more potential workers than dependents. Whether that window becomes an advantage or a problem depends entirely on what is done with it.

A Young Population, Two Futures Large young population → if schooled and given jobs → a big productive workforce → faster growth and rising incomes. Large young population → if left unschooled and jobless → mass youth unemployment → a burden rather than a boost.

Literacy underlies all of this. Literacy and education are the basic input for human development: they raise the productivity of workers, spread awareness of health, family size and the environment, and lift the standing of women and of the poorest sections of society. A more literate population is better able to use every other resource it has, which is why rising literacy so often runs alongside rising development.

The working population closes the account. A high dependency ratio and a low participation rate — especially the very low recorded participation of women — are marks of an under-developed economy, where too few produce for too many. Development means drawing more people, and more women, into productive work, and shifting that work away from crowded agriculture towards a wider range of activities. As that happens, the dependency burden eases.

9.8 Summary

  1. Demographic attributes describe the composition — the make-up — of a population, not its size or growth. They are measured by the census, the decadal count that reaches every household and records residence, sex, age, literacy and work for each person.

  2. Residence: India remains mostly rural — 68.84 per cent rural and 31.16 per cent urban in 2011 — because the economy is still largely agrarian. The urban share has risen through the century, and urbanisation is highest in the south and along the western coast, lowest in the hills and the eastern plains.

  3. A settlement is urban if it is a statutory town, or if it passes the census-town tests together: at least 5,000 people, a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre, and at least three-quarters of male main workers outside agriculture.

  4. Sex composition: the sex ratio (females per 1,000 males) was 943 in 2011, below parity. It fell through the century to a low of 927 in 1991 before recovering slightly. The deficit is made, not natural — it reflects son preference and the neglect of girls — and its map is shaped by both social attitudes and male-selective migration; Kerala alone exceeds parity.

  5. Age composition: the census uses three groups — young (0–14), working age (15–59) and old (60 and above); the young and old form the dependent population. India is young — over 30 per cent children, under a tenth elderly — giving a high dependency ratio. The age–sex pyramid shows the bulge set to climb from the young to the old across the century.

  6. Literacy: a literate person can read and write a simple message with understanding. The effective literacy rate, measured for those aged seven and above, replaced the crude rate in 1991. Literacy rose from 5.35 per cent in 1901 to 74.04 per cent in 2011 — slowly at first, then fast after independence. A male–female gap persists; Kerala leads and Bihar trails.

  7. Working population: the work participation rate was 39.8 per cent in 2011 (male 51.7, female 25.6), so most Indians are non-workers. Workers are main or marginal by the six-month rule, and much female work goes uncounted. Agriculture — cultivators plus agricultural labourers — still employs most workers, though ‘other workers’ is now the largest single category.

  8. Together the attributes are primary indicators of development, and the link runs both ways: composition shapes what development must do, and development, as it proceeds, reshapes composition.

Flowchart

Fig. 9.8-1 Caption: The census turns a headcount into a portrait of the population, attribute by attribute. Nodes: Census counts every person → sorts each by five questions → Residence: rural or urban; Sex: male or female; Age: young 0–14, working 15–59, or old 60+; Literacy: literate (aged 7+) or illiterate; Work: worker → main or marginal → cultivator, agricultural labourer, household industry or other worker, else non-worker → each answer is read as a rate or ratio: urban share, sex ratio, dependency ratio, literacy rate, participation rate → together these give the population’s composition → composition guides, and is reshaped by, development.

What This Chapter Cannot Tell You

A national average hides the state, and a state figure hides the district and the village — one number can average a crowded pocket with an almost empty one.

A count taken once a decade cannot show the change between censuses, and the 2011 count is now some years old.

The census records outcomes, not causes or intentions: it shows a female deficit or a low female work rate, but not why any single case arose, and it leaves much unpaid work — especially women’s — outside the count.

9.9 Key Terms

  1. Age–sex pyramid — a diagram showing the share of each age group, with males to the left of a central axis and females to the right, youngest at the base and oldest at the apex.

  2. Agricultural labourer — a worker who works for wages on land owned by others, not on the household’s own land.

  3. Census — the complete official count of a country’s population, taken on a fixed date and recording set details for every person.

  4. Census town — a place that is urban not by law but by meeting three tests together: at least 5,000 people, at least 400 persons per square kilometre, and at least three-quarters of male main workers outside agriculture.

  5. Child sex ratio — the number of females per 1,000 males in the 0–6 age group, free of the effects of migration and of longer female life expectancy.

  6. Composition — the internal make-up of a population: what kinds of people it contains and in what proportions.

  7. Crude literacy rate — literate persons as a percentage of the whole population, children included; used up to the 1981 census.

  8. Cultivator — a worker who works land that the household owns or holds.

  9. Demographic attributes — the characteristics that describe a population’s composition, such as residence, sex, age, literacy and work.

  10. Dependency ratio — the number of dependents (young plus old) for every 100 people of working age.

  11. Dependent population — the young and the old, who do little productive work and depend on the working-age group.

  12. Effective literacy rate — literate persons aged seven and above as a percentage of the population aged seven and above; used since 1991.

  13. Literacy rate — the number of literate persons for every 100 people, expressed as a percentage.

  14. Literate — a person who can both read and write a simple message with understanding, in any language.

  15. Main worker — a worker who worked for the major part of the year, six months (183 days) or more.

  16. Marginal worker — a worker who worked for less than the major part of the year, under six months.

  17. Non-worker — a person who does no economically productive work, such as a child, student, homemaker, or elderly or ill person.

  18. Rural population — the part of the population living in villages.

  19. Sex ratio — the number of females per 1,000 males in a population.

  20. Statutory town — a place that is urban by law, having a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area, whatever its size.

  21. Urban population — the part of the population living in towns and cities.

  22. Urbanisation — the shift of a society from predominantly rural to predominantly urban, in both the share of people in towns and the share in non-agricultural work.

  23. Village — in census usage, a revenue unit: a recorded piece of administered rural land, which may hold tiny hamlets or large settlements.

  24. Work participation rate — the percentage of workers in the total population.

  25. Worker — a person engaged in economically productive, gainful work.

  26. Working age group — the population aged 15 to 59 years, old enough and young enough to do most of the economy’s work.

9.10 Points to Ponder

  1. In the same decade, India’s literacy rate can rise while the number of people who cannot read also rises. What does that tell you about the difference between a share and a count — and which of the two should a planner watch more closely?

  2. Kerala has both the country’s highest sex ratio and its highest literacy. Is that a coincidence, or could one of them help produce the other? What evidence would you look for to decide?

  3. If male migration can raise a state’s sex ratio at the place people leave and lower it at the place they arrive, is a single sex-ratio figure describing the people who live there, or the movements that pass through?

  4. A young population is often called a ‘demographic dividend’, but a dividend is only paid if something is invested first. What would have to be invested for India’s young population to pay off — and what is likely to happen if it is not?

  5. The census counts a woman working unpaid on her family’s farm as a non-worker, while a man doing paid work in the same field is counted as a worker. Does the low female work participation rate measure how much women work, or how work is defined?

9.11 Objective Questions

  1. According to the Census of India 2011, the percentage of India’s population living in urban areas was:
    1. 27.78
    2. 31.16
    3. 39.80
    4. 68.84 [1 mark]
  2. A settlement is classified as a census town only if, among other conditions, at least this share of its male main workers is engaged in non-agricultural activities:
    1. one-half
    2. two-thirds
    3. three-quarters
    4. nine-tenths [1 mark]
  3. According to the Census of India 2011, the only state with a sex ratio above 1,000 was:
    1. Tamil Nadu
    2. Puducherry
    3. Kerala
    4. Mizoram [1 mark]
  4. The dependency ratio is the ratio of:
    1. workers to non-workers
    2. the young and the old to the working-age population
    3. females to males
    4. rural population to urban population [1 mark]
  5. The effective literacy rate is calculated for the population aged:
    1. 0 years and above
    2. 6 years and above
    3. 7 years and above
    4. 15 years and above [1 mark]
  6. Assertion (A): The sex ratio in the union territory of Delhi is lower than in Himachal Pradesh. Reason (R): Long-distance labour migration in India is largely male, adding men to destination cities and leaving a female surplus in the states they leave.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  7. Assertion (A): A rising literacy rate always means that the number of illiterate people is falling. Reason (R): Because the total population keeps growing, the number of illiterates can rise even while the literacy rate improves.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  8. Match each term in Column A with its correct description in Column B. [1 mark]
Column A Column B
a. Sex ratio i. a place that is urban by law
b. Main worker ii. females per 1,000 males
c. Statutory town iii. a person who worked six months or more in the year
d. Cultivator iv. a worker who works land the household holds

  1. Fill in the blank: The census classifies the population into three broad age groups — young, ____________ and old. [1 mark]

  2. State whether the following statement is true or false: In 2011, India’s work participation rate was higher for females than for males. [1 mark]

9.12 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define the term ‘literate’ as used by the Census of India. [2 marks]

  2. State two conditions, other than being a statutory town, that make a settlement urban. [2 marks]

  3. Differentiate between the crude literacy rate and the effective literacy rate. [3 marks]

  4. Give three reasons for the low sex ratio in India. [3 marks]

  5. Explain why the dependency ratio is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. [4 marks]

  6. ‘A low female work participation rate does not mean that women in India do little work.’ Evaluate this claim. [4 marks]

  7. Describe the trend of urbanisation in India since 1901, and explain why the level of urbanisation varies so widely between the states. [6 marks]

  8. Explain how each of the four demographic attributes studied in this chapter — residence, sex composition, age composition and literacy — bears on India’s development. [6 marks]

9.13 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation

  1. Study Fig. 9.2-1, which shows the urban share of India’s population from 1901 to 2011. [4 marks]

    1. In which decade did the urban share first cross 15 per cent?
    2. Describe how the slope of the line changes around 1941–51, and suggest one reason for that change.

  2. The figures below are for a hypothetical district. Using the formula for the sex ratio, calculate the district’s sex ratio and state whether it is favourable to females. Show your working. [3 marks] Males: 52,000 Females: 49,400

  3. Look at Map 9.3, which shows literacy in India in 2011. [3 marks]

    1. Name the shading class into which Kerala falls and the class into which Bihar falls.
    2. State one thing this choropleth map cannot tell you about literacy within a single state.

  4. Study Fig. 9.4-1, the age–sex pyramids projected for 2020, 2050 and 2100. Describe how the shape of India’s pyramid is expected to change across the century, and state one consequence of that change for the country’s dependency ratio. [4 marks]

  5. Table 9.3 gives the occupational structure of India’s workers in 2011. [3 marks]

    1. Which two categories together make up agriculture, and what is their combined share of all workers?
    2. What does the size of the ‘other workers’ category suggest about the direction of the Indian economy?