Population: Distribution, Density, Growth and Composition

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Geography Class XII (India: People and Economy), Chapter 1.

One country, more people than three continents together

India is the second most populous country in the world after China, with 1,210 million people in 2011. That is more than the combined population of North America, South America and Australia. It is often argued that such a large population puts pressure on limited resources and causes socio-economic problems. To judge that claim you must first know where the people live, how crowded each place is, how fast the number is growing and what the people are like. Those four questions are the four parts of this chapter. Every figure below comes from the Census of India 2011 unless a different year is named.

Where do the numbers come from?

Population data come from the Census, held every 10 years. The first population Census in India was conducted in 1872, but the first complete Census came only in 1881.

Distribution: who lives where

India's population is spread very unevenly. Uttar Pradesh has the highest population, followed by Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal. Ten states (Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Gujarat) together hold about 76 per cent of the country's people. By contrast, some states with a fairly large area have very small shares: Jammu & Kashmir (1.04 per cent), Arunachal Pradesh (0.11 per cent) and Uttarakhand (0.84 per cent). Size of area and size of population are two separate things, a point that is easy to forget in a statement-based question.

Why the unevenness? The answer is a relationship between people and physical, socio-economic and historical factors.

Pause and predict: farmers in the Ganga plain use land and water so heavily that both show signs of degradation. Why do people not leave in large numbers?

Check your answer: because the region has a long history of settlement and a well developed transport network, so jobs, markets and services are already concentrated there. History and infrastructure hold population in place even when the natural resource base weakens.

Density: how crowded is crowded?

Density of population is the number of persons per unit area, and it shows the distribution of people in relation to land. India's density in 2011 was 382 persons per sq km, up from 117 persons per sq km in 1951, a rise of more than 200 persons in 50 years. State figures range from as low as 17 persons per sq km in Arunachal Pradesh to 11,297 in the National Capital Territory of Delhi.

Bihar has the highest density among the states, which is a common one-line question.

Why overall density is a crude measure. It divides people by all land, including mountains, deserts and forests. For a country with a big farming population, two sharper measures describe the pressure on usable land.

$$\text{Physiological density} = \dfrac{\text{Total population}}{\text{Net cultivated area}}$$

$$\text{Agricultural density} = \dfrac{\text{Total agricultural population}}{\text{Net cultivable area}}$$

The agricultural population includes cultivators, agricultural labourers and their family members.

Worked example: three densities for one district. A district has 10,000 people in all, of whom 6,000 depend on agriculture, a total area of 100 sq km and 20 sq km of cultivated land.

The common wrong step is to divide the agricultural population by the total area. Both of the sharper measures divide by cultivated or cultivable land, never by the whole area.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: use the 2011 state figures given above, such as Bihar at 1,102 and Delhi at 11,297. In reality: state boundaries have changed since 2011, because Telangana was formed in 2014 and Ladakh became a separate Union Territory in 2019. So older tables show Andhra Pradesh undivided and Jammu & Kashmir with Ladakh. Why it matters: when a question quotes a state's share or density, read it as 2011 Census data for the boundaries of that time.

Growth: how fast is the number rising?

Growth of population is the change in the number of people in an area between two points in time, expressed as a percentage. It has two components. Natural growth comes from the crude birth rate and the crude death rate. Induced growth comes from migration into and out of the area. The chapter studies only natural growth. India's annual growth rate in 2011 was 1.64 per cent.

$$g = \dfrac{p_2 - p_1}{p_1} \times 100$$

Here $p_1$ is the population of the base year and $p_2$ that of the present year. The population doubling time is the time a population takes to double itself at its current annual growth rate.

Worked example: decadal growth rate, 1991 to 2001. The population was 84,63,02,688 in 1991 and 1,02,86,10,328 in 2001.

The common wrong step is dividing by the present-year population instead of the base year.

Reading the table gives two key facts: 1921 is the only decade with a fall in population (–0.31 per cent), and 1971 has the highest decadal growth (24.80 per cent). Growth rate is a percentage, so it can fall while the absolute addition stays about the same. The increase in 2001–2011 (18,15,83,094) was almost equal to that in 1991–2001 (18,23,07,640), even though the growth rate fell from 21.54 to 17.64 per cent.

The four phases of growth in the twentieth century. Phase names are a high-value memory item.

Regional variation. In 1991–2001, Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Puducherry and Goa grew at no more than 20 per cent over the decade, and Kerala recorded the lowest growth rate, 9.4 per cent, in the country. A continuous belt of states in the north-west, north and north-central parts, including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, averaged 20 to 25 per cent. In 2001–2011 nearly every state and Union Territory recorded a lower decadal growth rate than in 1991–2001. Among the six most populous states, the fall was smallest in Andhra Pradesh (3.5 percentage points) and largest in Maharashtra (6.7 percentage points).

Adolescents and youth. Adolescents (10 to 19 years) were about 20.9 per cent of the population in 2011, of whom 52.7 per cent were male and 47.3 per cent female. They are a youthful resource with high potential but are vulnerable if not guided. The challenges the chapter lists include a lower age at marriage, female illiteracy, school dropouts, low nutrition, high maternal mortality among adolescent mothers, HIV and AIDS, disability, drug abuse and alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency. The government responds with policies, such as:

Two views. For the exam: a very large population puts pressure on limited resources and causes socio-economic problems, and the youth need guidance and education. Another reading: many demographers describe a large young population as a possible "demographic dividend", an economic opportunity when enough education and jobs are available. Why it matters: the same number of young people can be a burden or an asset depending on skills and employment, so a balanced long answer should mention both.

Composition: what kind of people?

Population composition studies age and sex, place of residence, ethnic characteristics, tribes, language, religion, marital status, literacy and education, and occupation. The chapter covers four: rural-urban, language, religion and workers.

Rural and urban

In 2011 about 68.8 per cent of Indians lived in villages and 31.16 per cent in urban areas. India has 6,40,867 villages, of which 5,97,608 (93.2 per cent) are inhabited. Himachal Pradesh and Bihar have very high shares of rural population, while Goa and Mizoram have much smaller rural shares than the other states. Village size varies from less than 200 persons in the hill states of the north-east, western Rajasthan and the Rann of Kachchh to as many as 17 thousand in Kerala and parts of Maharashtra.

The urban share is low, but it is growing much faster than the rural share because of economic development and better health and hygiene. Rural-urban migration is especially visible along main road and rail links in the North Indian Plains and in industrial belts such as Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru–Mysuru, Madurai–Coimbatore, Ahmedabad–Surat, Delhi–Kanpur and Ludhiana–Jalandhar. Urbanisation stays low in agriculturally stagnant parts of the middle and lower Ganga Plain, Telangana, unirrigated western Rajasthan, remote hilly and tribal areas of the north-east, flood-prone areas of the peninsula and eastern Madhya Pradesh.

Language

India has great linguistic diversity. Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928) recorded 179 languages and 544 dialects. Today there are about 22 scheduled languages and many non-scheduled ones. Among scheduled languages Hindi has the highest percentage of speakers, and Sanskrit, Bodo and Manipuri have the smallest groups (2011). Language regions merge gradually and overlap in frontier zones rather than having sharp boundaries.

Speakers of major languages belong to four families.

Religion

Religion affects the cultural and political life of many Indians, so the Census records it in detail. The 2011 composition was as follows.

The spatial pattern shows that some states and districts have a large numerical strength of one religion while the same group has little presence in others.

Religion also leaves a mark on the landscape through sacred structures, burial grounds and sacred groves, from small village shrines to temples, mosques, gurudwaras, monasteries, churches and cathedrals, which differ in size, form and density.

Workers

The Census sorts people by economic status into main workers, marginal workers and non-workers.

Only 39.8 per cent of Indians are workers, leaving about 60 per cent as non-workers, which points to a large dependent population and possible unemployment or under-employment. The work participation rate ranges from about 29.1 per cent in Lakshadweep to about 51.9 per cent in Himachal Pradesh. The reason a higher rate can appear in less developed areas is that subsistence economies need many manual workers.

Occupational structure. The 2011 Census groups workers into four categories: cultivators, agricultural labourers, household industry workers and other workers. In broad sectors the picture is below.

The share of workers in agriculture fell from 58.2 per cent in 2001 to 54.6 per cent in 2011, while secondary and tertiary shares rose. This is a shift from farm to non-farm work. Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland have very large shares of cultivators. Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh have high shares of agricultural labourers. Delhi, Chandigarh and Puducherry have very large shares of "other workers", because farm land is limited and urbanisation and industrialisation need non-farm workers.

Worked example: women's share of workers. The Census gives workers by sex in each sector.

Women's share is calculated as female workers divided by all workers in that sector. Male workers outnumber female workers in all three sectors. The number of female workers is relatively high in the primary sector, with some recent improvement in the other two.

Gender and development. The chapter notes that the division into male, female and transgender is often treated as natural, but social roles and institutions turn biological differences into discrimination and exclusion. The 1995 UNDP report is quoted: "If development is not engendered it is endangered." The government launched the nationwide campaign Beti Bachao–Beti Padhao to address this.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: The World Population gives the global patterns of distribution, density and growth that India is compared against.
• Next: Human Settlements looks at how Indians live, in villages and towns, and the functions of towns.
• Also read: Human Development shows how education, health and income link to population quality, and Land Resources and Agriculture uses agricultural density and the farming workforce.