Chapter 20 — 5.9 Population of India

The population of a country is the number of people living in it at a given time, counted by the census. India's census has been taken every ten years since 1872, regularly since 1881, and the sixteenth census was that of 2011, which counted 121.09 crore (1,210.9 million) people, 62.3 crore males and 58.7 crore females, on 1 March 2011. The census of 2021 was postponed by the pandemic, and by the estimate of the United Nations India passed China in 2023 to become the most populous country in the world, with about 142-145 crore people, about 17.8 per cent of humanity on 2.4 per cent of the earth's land. In 2011 India held 17.5 per cent of the world's people, more than the whole of Africa or of Europe.

The growth of this population is the central fact. India had about 23.8 crore people in 1901 and 121 crore in 2011, a five-fold increase in 110 years, most of it since 1951. Growth is measured in two ways: the absolute increase, the number added in a decade, which was 18.2 crore between 2001 and 2011, more than the population of Brazil; and the growth rate, the increase as a percentage of the starting population, which was 17.7 per cent for that decade, or an annual exponential growth rate of 1.64 per cent. The growth rate is the difference between the birth rate (births per thousand people a year, about 20 in 2011 and about 17 now) and the death rate (deaths per thousand, about 7), together with net migration, which for India is negligible. The natural growth rate of about 1.3 per cent means that India adds about 1.5 crore people every year, a new Kolkata every four months.

The total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime, has fallen from about 6 in 1951 to 2.0 in 2021, below the replacement level of 2.1, so that the population will continue to grow only because the number of young people who will become parents is already large, an effect called population momentum; it is expected to peak at about 165-170 crore around 2060 and then decline. The growth rate has already fallen from its peak of 24.8 per cent in 1961-71 to 17.7 per cent in 2001-11, and was lower still in the 2010s. The figures the examination expects are the 2011 population, the decadal growth rate and the absolute increase, and the meaning of birth rate, death rate, natural growth rate and total fertility rate.

The growth of India's population from 1901 falls into four phases that the examination asks for by name and figure. The first phase, 1901-1921, is the period of stagnant or stationary population. The population rose from 23.8 crore in 1901 to 25.2 crore in 1911 and then fell to 25.1 crore in 1921, the only decade of decline in Indian census history, so that the growth over twenty years was about 5 per cent. Both birth rate and death rate were very high, near 48 and 47 per thousand, and famine, plague, cholera, malaria and the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which killed about 1.2-1.7 crore Indians, cancelled the births. The year 1921 is called the demographic divide or 'the great divide', because after it the population never again fell.

The second phase, 1921-1951, is the period of steady growth. The population rose from 25.1 crore to 36.1 crore, a growth of about 11-14 per cent per decade. The death rate began to fall as famine relief, epidemic control, railways that carried grain to the hungry and elementary sanitation reduced mortality, while the birth rate stayed high; the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Partition of 1947 slowed the last decade.

The third phase, 1951-1981, is the period of rapid or explosive growth, the population explosion. The population rose from 36.1 crore in 1951 to 43.9 crore in 1961, 54.8 crore in 1971 and 68.3 crore in 1981; the growth rate reached its highest ever, 24.8 per cent in 1961-71 and 24.7 per cent in 1971-81. The cause was the collapse of the death rate, from 27 per thousand in 1951 to 15 in 1981, brought about by the control of malaria, smallpox, cholera and plague with DDT, vaccines and antibiotics, the end of famine through the Green Revolution and the public distribution system, better water supply and medical care, while the birth rate fell only slowly, from 40 to 34. The gap between the two rates was the explosion.

The fourth phase, 1981 to the present, is the period of high growth with definite signs of slowing down. The population rose from 68.3 crore to 84.6 crore in 1991, 102.9 crore in 2001 and 121.1 crore in 2011, still adding record numbers in each decade, but the growth rate fell from 24.7 to 23.9, 21.5 and 17.7 per cent as the birth rate at last came down, through family planning, female education, later marriage, urbanisation and the wish for smaller families, especially in the south. The decade 2001-11 was the first since Independence in which the absolute increase was smaller than in the previous decade, and the fall has continued, so that India is now in the last stage of its demographic transition.

The density of population is the number of people per unit of area, usually per square kilometre, obtained by dividing the population by the area. This arithmetic density is the commonest measure; the physiological density divides the population by the cultivated area only and the agricultural density divides the farm population by the cultivated area, and both give a truer picture of the pressure on the land. India's arithmetic density in 2011 was 382 persons per sq km, up from 77 in 1901, 117 in 1951 and 325 in 2001, and about ten times the world average of 50; among large countries only Bangladesh and Japan are denser.

The density is very uneven. Among the states, Bihar is the densest with 1,106 persons per sq km, followed by West Bengal with 1,028, Kerala 860, Uttar Pradesh 829, Haryana 573, Tamil Nadu 555, Punjab 551 and Jharkhand 414. The least dense are Arunachal Pradesh with 17, Mizoram 52, Sikkim 86, Nagaland 119, Manipur 122, Himachal Pradesh 123, Uttarakhand 189 and Jammu and Kashmir 124, with Rajasthan 200, Madhya Pradesh 236 and Chhattisgarh 189 among the large states. Among the union territories Delhi is the densest at 11,320, and Chandigarh, Puducherry, Daman and Diu and Lakshadweep are all above 2,000, while the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have 46. Among districts, North East Delhi has over 37,000 and Kolkata 24,306, while Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh has 1.

On a density map of India three belts appear. The belt of very high density, above 800, is the Ganga plain from Punjab through Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to West Bengal, the Kerala coast and the Tamil Nadu coast. The belt of moderate density, 200-800, is the Deccan plateau, the eastern coast, Gujarat, Odisha, Assam and Jharkhand. The belt of low density, below 200, is the Himalaya, the north-eastern hills, the Thar desert, the forested plateaus of central India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The next topic explains why.

People live where they can make a living, and the uneven distribution of India's population is explained by physical and human factors acting together. Among the physical factors, relief is the first: level plains are easy to farm, build on and move across, so the Ganga plain and the coastal plains hold the densest population, while the steep, cold Himalaya, the dissected north-eastern hills and the rugged plateaus of central India are thinly peopled. Climate is the second: a moderate temperature and reliable rainfall support agriculture and health, as in the Ganga delta and the Kerala coast, while the extreme cold of Ladakh, the aridity of the Thar with 100 people per sq km in Jaisalmer, and the excessive rain and malaria of some hill tracts repel settlement. Soil is the third: the deep fertile alluvium of the plains and deltas and the black soil of the Deccan feed dense populations, while the laterite, the desert sand and the stony mountain soils feed few. Water is the fourth: rivers, lakes and abundant ground water attract people, which is why every ancient city stood on a river and the delta is so full, and the dry interior is empty. Natural vegetation and minerals also act: dense forest keeps people out, as in the tribal belts of central India and the north-east, while coal and iron have drawn the crowded industrial towns of Chhotanagpur.

Among the human factors, agriculture is the first: the older and more intensive the farming, the denser the people, so the rice deltas of Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where two or three crops a year are grown, are the fullest rural areas in the world. Industry and mining concentrate people in the Hooghly belt, Mumbai-Pune, Ahmedabad-Surat, Chennai-Bengaluru and the Damodar valley. Transport, the railways, roads and ports, has drawn people to the nodes of Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi and to the lines between them. Urbanisation and the growth of trade, administration and services gather people into cities, so that Delhi and Chandigarh have the highest densities of all. Historical and cultural factors matter: the Ganga plain has been settled and cultivated for three thousand years, the ports were founded by the Europeans, and the Partition of 1947 moved people into Punjab, Delhi and West Bengal. And political factors such as the security of a region, the settlement of refugees and the planned development of new towns and irrigation colonies shift people, as the Indira Gandhi canal has done in Rajasthan.

The examiner usually asks why one region is dense and another sparse: why the Ganga delta and Kerala are crowded (level land, fertile alluvium, ample water, warm climate, intensive rice farming, old settlement, industry, ports) and why Arunachal, Ladakh and the Thar are empty (mountains, cold or aridity, poor soil, forest, no water, isolation). The answer should match each factor to the place.

The sex ratio in India is defined as the number of females per 1,000 males; in most other countries it is stated the other way round. A ratio near 1,000 is natural, and in most of the world females slightly outnumber males because they live longer; India's ratio has been below 1,000 throughout the census period and is one of the most unfavourable to women in the world. It was 972 in 1901, fell to 946 in 1951 and to its lowest, 927 in 1991, and rose to 933 in 2001 and 943 in 2011. Among the states Kerala has the highest, 1,084, the only large state with more women than men, followed by Tamil Nadu 996, Andhra Pradesh 993, Chhattisgarh 991 and Meghalaya 989; Haryana has the lowest, 879, followed by Jammu and Kashmir 889, Sikkim 890, Punjab 895 and Uttar Pradesh 912, and the union territories of Daman and Diu (618) and Delhi (868) are lower still. West Bengal stands at 950, above the national average.

The causes of the low ratio are social rather than biological: the preference for sons, which leads to the neglect of girls in food and medical care and, since the 1980s, to sex-selective abortion after ultrasound tests, banned by the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994 but still practised; the higher death rate of women in childbirth in the past; and the migration of men to the cities, which raises the ratio in the villages they leave and lowers it in Delhi, Mumbai and the industrial towns. Kerala's high ratio reflects female education, later marriage, good health care and the migration of its men to the Gulf. The most worrying figure is the child sex ratio of children aged 0-6, which fell from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001 and 919 in 2011, the lowest since Independence, and to 834 in Haryana; it measures sex-selection directly, and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign of 2015 was launched against it.

The age structure divides the population into the young (0-14 years), the working age (15-59 or 15-64) and the old (60 or 65 and above). In 2011 about 29 per cent of Indians were under 15, 63 per cent were of working age and 8 per cent were 60 or over; the median age was about 25 in 2011 and 28 now, against 38 in China and 48 in Japan, making India one of the youngest large countries. A large young population means a high dependency ratio, the number of dependants per hundred workers, and a demand for schools and jobs; but as the young cohorts enter working age and fertility falls, the share of workers rises and the country enjoys a demographic dividend, described later. The share of the old is rising as life expectancy increases, from 32 years in 1951 to about 70 now, and will bring the problems of ageing that Kerala already faces. The age-sex pyramid shows the structure: India's is a broad-based pyramid narrowing upward, the shape of a young, growing population, while Kerala's is already barrel-shaped.

Literacy is the most important measure of the quality of a population, because a literate people can learn, earn, plan their families and take part in a democracy. The Indian census defines a literate person as one aged seven years and above who can both read and write with understanding in any language; a person who can only read, or only sign a name, is not literate. The literacy rate is the percentage of literates among the population aged seven and above.

India's literacy rate has risen from 5.4 per cent in 1901 and 18.3 per cent in 1951 to 52.2 per cent in 1991, 64.8 per cent in 2001 and 74.0 per cent in 2011, and is about 77-78 per cent now. Male literacy in 2011 was 82.1 per cent and female literacy 65.5 per cent, a gap of 16.6 points, narrowing from 24.8 in 1991; the decade 2001-11 was the first in which the absolute number of illiterates fell. Urban literacy was 84.1 per cent and rural 67.8 per cent. Among the states Kerala leads with 94.0 per cent, followed by Lakshadweep 91.8, Mizoram 91.3, Goa 88.7, Tripura 87.2 and Daman and Diu, and Bihar is last with 61.8 per cent, preceded by Arunachal Pradesh 65.4, Rajasthan 66.1, Jharkhand 66.4 and Andhra Pradesh 67.0; West Bengal stands at 76.3 per cent (male 81.7, female 70.5), a little above the national figure. Kerala's success rests on a century of missionary, princely and public schools, land reforms, female education and public health; Bihar's failure on poverty, caste, the neglect of girls and weak schools. The lowest female literacy is in Bihar (51.5 per cent) and Rajasthan (52.1).

The causes of low literacy are poverty that sends children to work, the shortage and poor quality of schools, especially in villages and for girls, early marriage, the low status of women, the language barrier for tribal children and the sheer growth of the population that outran the schools for decades. The measures taken include the constitutional directive of free and compulsory education, the Right to Education Act of 2009 that makes schooling from 6 to 14 a fundamental right, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of 2001 for universal elementary education, the mid-day meal scheme that draws poor children to school, the National Literacy Mission of 1988 and the later Saakshar Bharat for adults, the Kasturba Gandhi girls' schools, scholarships for girls such as West Bengal's Kanyashree of 2013, and the National Education Policy of 2020. Literacy is now near-universal among the young, and the remaining illiterates are mostly older women in the northern villages.

The occupational structure is the division of the working population among the kinds of work. The census counts workers, persons engaged in any economically productive activity, and divides them into main workers, who worked for more than six months of the year, and marginal workers, who worked less; the rest are non-workers, the children, students, housewives, old and unemployed. In 2011 about 39.8 per cent of Indians were workers (48.2 crore people), 53 per cent of males and 25.5 per cent of females, the low female figure reflecting the non-counting of household work. The work participation rate is this percentage of workers in the population.

Workers are grouped into four census categories: cultivators, who farm their own or leased land (24.6 per cent of workers in 2011); agricultural labourers, who work on others' land for wages (30.0 per cent); household industry workers (3.8 per cent); and other workers in industry, trade, transport, services and government (41.6 per cent). Cultivators and agricultural labourers together, 54.6 per cent, show that more than half of India's workers still live by farming, though the share has fallen from 72 per cent in 1951 and 67 per cent in 1991. In the economist's terms, the primary sector (agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining) employs about 45 per cent of workers today but produces only about 17 per cent of the national income, the secondary sector (manufacturing, construction, power) employs about 25 per cent, and the tertiary sector (trade, transport, services, IT, government) employs about 30 per cent but produces more than half the income. The movement of workers from the primary to the secondary and tertiary sectors is the mark of a developing economy, and India's movement has been slow because industry has not created enough jobs; the shift has been mostly into construction and low-paid services. Among the states, the share of farming is highest in Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and lowest in Kerala, Goa, Tamil Nadu and Punjab.

By residence, the census divides the population into rural, living in villages, and urban, living in towns. In 2011 68.8 per cent (83.3 crore) of Indians were rural and 31.2 per cent (37.7 crore) urban, in about 6.4 lakh villages and 7,935 towns; the urban share has risen from 11 per cent in 1901 and 17 per cent in 1951 and is about 36 per cent now. India is thus still a land of villages, but its urban population alone is larger than the whole population of the United States. The most urbanised states are Goa (62 per cent), Mizoram, Tamil Nadu (48), Kerala (48), Maharashtra (45) and Gujarat (43), and the least are Himachal Pradesh (10), Bihar (11), Assam (14) and Odisha (17); West Bengal is 31.9 per cent urban, close to the national figure, with the Kolkata region holding most of its towns. The next topic takes up urbanisation.

Migration is the movement of people from one place to another with the intention of settling there, permanently or for a long time. It is the third factor of population change after births and deaths, and though international migration is small for India, internal migration is enormous: the census of 2011 counted about 45.6 crore Indians, 37 per cent of the population, living in a place other than that of their birth, and another 1.8 crore Indians live abroad, the largest diaspora in the world.

Migration is classified by direction into four streams: rural to rural, the largest, mostly women moving on marriage and labourers moving to the farms of Punjab and Haryana; rural to urban, the most important economically, the movement of villagers to the cities for work; urban to urban, the movement between towns for jobs and education; and urban to rural, the smallest, the return of retired or displaced people. It is classified by distance into intra-district, inter-district, inter-state and international, and by duration into permanent, semi-permanent and seasonal or circular migration, in which labourers leave home for the harvest, the brick kiln, the construction site or the sugar-cane cutting for a few months every year and return, a pattern of perhaps 10 crore Indians from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. Emigration is leaving a country, immigration entering it; India has received immigrants from Bangladesh, Nepal and Tibet and has sent emigrants to the Gulf, the United States, Britain, Canada and south-east Asia, from whom it receives about 100 billion dollars a year in remittances, the largest in the world.

The causes are grouped as push factors, which drive people out of the source region, and pull factors, which draw them to the destination. The push factors are poverty, unemployment and underemployment on tiny holdings, drought, flood and crop failure, the pressure of population on the land, landlessness, caste oppression, lack of schools and hospitals, and natural disasters and conflict. The pull factors are jobs in industry, construction and services, higher wages, education, health care, better housing and entertainment, the presence of relatives and community, and the freedom of city life; for women the chief cause recorded is marriage, and for the educated it is employment. The great streams flow from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Jharkhand to Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka and West Bengal, and from the villages of every state to its own cities.

The effects are double-edged. On the source region migration relieves the pressure on land, brings remittances that build houses and pay for schooling, and spreads new ideas, but it also drains the young and skilled, leaves the old and the women to farm, and breaks families. On the destination migration supplies the labour that the cities and the farms of Punjab need and enriches the culture, but it also crowds the slums, strains housing, water, transport and sanitation, lowers wages and provokes conflict with the local population, as in Mumbai and Assam. On the migrants themselves it brings both opportunity and hardship, and the lockdown of 2020, when crores of migrant workers walked home from the cities, showed how insecure their lives are.

Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of a population living in towns and cities, and the spread of urban ways of life. The Indian census defines a town as a place with a municipality or similar body (a statutory town) or, if it has none, a place with at least 5,000 people, a density of at least 400 per sq km and at least 75 per cent of its male workers in non-agricultural occupations (a census town). A city is a town of 1 lakh or more; a metropolitan city or million-plus city has 10 lakh or more; and a megacity has 1 crore or more. An urban agglomeration is a city with its physically continuous suburbs and outgrowths, such as Kolkata with Howrah, Salt Lake and the Hooghly towns.

India's urban population grew from 2.6 crore (11 per cent) in 1901 and 6.2 crore (17 per cent) in 1951 to 28.6 crore (27.8 per cent) in 2001 and 37.7 crore (31.2 per cent) in 2011, and is about 50 crore (36 per cent) now; the urban population grew by 9.1 crore in 2001-11, more than the rural population for the first time. The number of towns rose from 5,161 in 2001 to 7,935 in 2011, and the number of million-plus cities from 35 to 53, holding 16 crore people, 43 per cent of the urban total. The three megacities of 2011 were Greater Mumbai (1.84 crore), Delhi (1.63 crore) and Kolkata (1.41 crore), followed by Chennai (87 lakh), Bengaluru (85 lakh), Hyderabad (77 lakh), Ahmedabad (63 lakh), Pune (50 lakh), Surat (46 lakh) and Jaipur (31 lakh); Delhi and Bengaluru have grown fastest since and Delhi's agglomeration is now larger than Mumbai's. The pattern is one of concentration: a few great cities grow while the small towns stagnate, so that the urban population is top-heavy.

The causes of urbanisation are the pull of the cities described under migration, the industrialisation and the growth of services since 1991, the natural increase of the city populations themselves, and the reclassification of large villages as census towns as their workers leave farming, which accounted for a third of the urban growth of 2001-11. The problems of India's cities are those of growth outrunning provision: housing shortage and slums, in which about 6.5 crore people or 17 per cent of urban Indians live, 42 per cent in Mumbai and 30 per cent in Kolkata, in Dharavi, Basanti and their like; water supply and sanitation, with untreated sewage in every river; traffic congestion and air pollution, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai being among the world's most polluted; solid waste in the mountains of Deonar and Dhapa; unemployment and the informal economy; crime; the loss of farmland and wetland at the edges, as in the East Kolkata Wetlands; and urban sprawl along the highways. The remedies attempted are planned satellite towns such as Salt Lake, New Town and Navi Mumbai, the metro railways of Kolkata (the first, 1984), Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai, the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT of 2015, the Swachh Bharat mission, housing for all under PMAY, the regulation of pollution, and the dispersal of industry and offices to the smaller cities, so that the villages are not emptied into three or four megacities.

The theory of demographic transition explains how a population passes from high birth and death rates to low ones as a country develops, in stages that every developed nation has followed and that India is now completing. In the first stage, the pre-industrial, both the birth rate and the death rate are high, near 40-50 per thousand, and roughly equal, so that the population grows very slowly or fluctuates with famine and epidemic; India was in this stage until 1921. In the second stage, the early expanding, the death rate falls sharply because of better food, clean water, vaccines and medicines, while the birth rate stays high because the customs of early marriage and large families change slowly; the gap produces rapid growth, the population explosion; India entered this stage after 1921 and was fully in it from 1951 to 1981. In the third stage, the late expanding, the birth rate begins to fall as education, especially of women, urbanisation, the cost of raising children, later marriage and family planning spread, while the death rate stays low; growth slows; India entered this stage in the 1980s and is now near its end. In the fourth stage, the low stationary, both rates are low, around 10 per thousand, and the population is stable; Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have reached it and the country as a whole will reach it in the 2040s. Some writers add a fifth stage in which the birth rate falls below the death rate and the population declines, as in Japan and much of Europe.

The transition is driven by the fall in the death rate and then in the birth rate. The death rate falls with public health; the birth rate falls with female literacy above all, and the states of India show the pattern exactly: Kerala with 94 per cent literacy has a fertility rate of 1.8, Bihar with 62 per cent has 3.0. The infant mortality rate, deaths of children under one year per thousand live births, fell from 146 in 1951 to 28 now, and as parents become confident that their children will survive they have fewer.

The demographic dividend is the economic benefit a country can gain during the third stage, when the share of the working-age population (15-64) rises above that of the dependants because the birth rate has fallen but the large cohorts born earlier are now adults. More workers and fewer dependants mean higher savings, investment and income per head, as East Asia showed between 1965 and 1990. India's working-age share rose from 58 per cent in 1991 to 63 per cent in 2011 and will peak at about 68 per cent around 2040, and the median age of 28 makes it the youngest of the large economies; the window is open for about three decades. But the dividend is not automatic: it is earned only if the young are educated and healthy and if the economy creates jobs for them; a young population without work is a demographic burden, and the low female work participation, the poor quality of schooling and the shortage of manufacturing jobs are the obstacles India must overcome. The southern states, which entered the transition first, are already ageing, while Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, still young, will supply the workers of the future, which is why migration from north to south will grow.

A population that has grown five-fold in a century on a fixed area of land creates problems in every field, and the examination expects them under clear heads. The first is pressure on land and food. The per-capita availability of cultivated land has fallen from 0.48 hectares in 1951 to about 0.11 now, holdings have fragmented to an average of 1.1 hectares, and though the Green Revolution has kept food production ahead of population, the margin is thin, the soil and ground water are being exhausted to maintain it, and about 15 per cent of Indians are undernourished. Forests, grazing land and wetlands have been cleared for fields and houses.

The second is unemployment and underemployment. About 1.2 crore young people enter the labour force every year, and the economy does not create that many productive jobs, so millions are unemployed, more are underemployed on farms where they add nothing to output (disguised unemployment), and most of the rest work in the insecure informal sector; the pressure keeps wages low and drives the migration to the cities. The third is poverty and low per-capita income: whatever the growth of the national income, it must be divided among more people, and about 10-20 per cent of Indians remain below the poverty line; the poorest states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are the fastest-growing in population.

The fourth is the strain on social services: schools are overcrowded and teachers few, hospitals and doctors are short (one doctor to 1,500 people in the villages), housing is inadequate and 17 per cent of city-dwellers live in slums, and water supply, sanitation, electricity and transport fall behind demand. The fifth is the environment: deforestation, soil erosion, the fall of the water table, the pollution of air, rivers and land, the loss of wildlife and the growth of waste all follow from the demand of more people for fuel, water, food and goods, and India's carbon emissions, though low per head, are the third largest in the world because of the number of heads. The sixth is urban congestion, the slums, traffic, pollution and crime of the megacities. The seventh is the health of women and children, since frequent childbearing weakens mothers and the infant mortality of poor families remains high. And the eighth is the burden on the economy: the capital that should build factories and roads must be spent on feeding, schooling and housing the new arrivals, so that a high growth of population eats the growth of income; a country must run to stay in the same place.

Against these, some point out that a large population is also a large market and a large labour force, that India's problem is as much the poor quality of its people, in health, education and skill, as their quantity, and that the demographic dividend makes the young population an asset if it is used. The consensus of Indian policy since 1952 has been that the growth of population must be slowed while the quality of the population is raised, which is the subject of the next topic.

India was the first country in the world to adopt an official family planning programme, in 1952, in the First Five Year Plan, to slow the growth of population. The programme began with clinics and education, moved in the 1960s to targets for sterilisation and the intra-uterine device with the slogan 'Do ya teen bachche, bas', and in the Emergency of 1975-77 was pushed with coercion into a campaign of forced sterilisation that provoked such a reaction that the programme was renamed family welfare in 1977 and made voluntary, with the slogan 'Hum do, hamare do' for the two-child family. The 1980s and 1990s added maternal and child health, immunisation and the Integrated Child Development Services, and the National Population Policy of 2000 set the present goals: to meet the unmet need for contraception, health care and education; to bring the total fertility rate down to the replacement level of 2.1 by 2010 (achieved, at the national level, in 2021); and to stabilise the population by 2045. Its measures are the free provision of contraceptives and sterilisation, the raising of the legal age of marriage to 18 for girls and 21 for boys (proposed to be 21 for both), the universal immunisation of children, the reduction of infant and maternal mortality, universal school education to 14, incentives for the two-child family and for delaying the first birth, and the involvement of the panchayats and the health workers of the villages, the ASHAs, in delivering them. The National Rural Health Mission of 2005 and its urban counterpart carry the health side; Janani Suraksha Yojana pays for institutional delivery; and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign of 2015 fights sex-selection.

The results are visible in the fall of the total fertility rate from 6 in 1951 to 2.0 in 2021, of the birth rate from 40 to 17, of the infant mortality rate from 146 to 28 and of the decadal growth from 24.8 to 17.7 per cent and lower. But the results are uneven: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Punjab and Himachal are at or below replacement fertility, while Bihar (3.0), Uttar Pradesh (2.4), Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are still above it and will supply most of India's future growth. The lesson of the contrast, drawn by every study, is that the fall of fertility follows female education, women's employment, later marriage, lower infant mortality and economic security more than it follows targets and incentives; Kerala achieved replacement fertility in 1988 with no coercion, and Bangladesh has overtaken India by the same road. The 2000 policy therefore rests on the rights-based and voluntary approach: give people, above all women, the education, health and means to choose, and they will choose smaller families.

The population policy is linked to the wider human development programmes: the Right to Education, the mid-day meal, the National Food Security Act of 2013, Swachh Bharat, the public distribution system and the employment guarantee (MGNREGA) all raise the quality of the population that the census counts. The examination asks for the year and features of the family planning programme, the goals of the National Population Policy of 2000 and the measures to control population growth, and the student should be able to list six or seven of them.

West Bengal is one of the most densely populated places on earth. The census of 2011 counted 9.13 crore people (9,12,76,115), 4.68 crore males and 4.45 crore females, making it the fourth most populous state after Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, with 7.5 per cent of India's people on 2.7 per cent of its area (88,752 sq km). Its density of 1,028 per sq km is the second highest among the states after Bihar and nearly three times the Indian average, and about 10 crore people live in the state today.

The state's population grew from 1.6 crore in 1901 to 2.6 crore in 1951, 4.4 crore in 1971, 6.8 crore in 1991, 8.0 crore in 2001 and 9.1 crore in 2011. Two waves of refugees from East Pakistan, after the Partition of 1947 and during the Bangladesh war of 1971, added several crore people, and migrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha have come to the Kolkata industrial belt for a century, so that the growth of the state in the 1950s-70s was above the national rate. Since then it has fallen faster than the Indian figure: the decadal growth was 13.8 per cent in 2001-11 against India's 17.7, the total fertility rate is about 1.6, well below replacement, and the state has entered the fourth stage of the transition, so that its share of India's population is slowly falling.

The distribution is uneven. The densest districts are Kolkata (24,306 per sq km), North 24 Parganas (2,445), Howrah (3,306), Hooghly (1,753) and Nadia (1,316), the delta and the industrial belt, and the least dense are Purulia (468), Bankura (523), Darjeeling (586), Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar (about 620) and Dakshin Dinajpur (755), the plateau, the hills and the far north. The reasons are those of India in small: the flat, fertile, well-watered alluvium of the delta with its three rice crops, the jute fields, the mills, the port and the capital city gather the people, while the laterite plateau of the west, the forested hills of the north and the Sundarbans hold few. North 24 Parganas is the most populous district with over 1 crore people, more than many states.

The composition: the sex ratio is 950, above India's 943, highest in Dakshin Dinajpur (956) and lowest in Kolkata (908) because of male migrants; the child sex ratio is 956, one of the best in India. The literacy rate is 76.3 per cent (male 81.7, female 70.5), highest in Purba Medinipur (87.0) and Kolkata (86.3) and lowest in Uttar Dinajpur (59.1), Purulia (64.5) and Malda (61.7). The population is 68.1 per cent rural and 31.9 per cent urban, the urban population concentrated in the Kolkata urban agglomeration of 1.41 crore, the third largest in India, with Asansol-Durgapur (12 lakh), Siliguri (7 lakh), Bardhaman, Kharagpur and Haldia as the other urban centres. About 43 per cent of workers are in agriculture, and the state has a large share of its workers in household industry, trade and services. Bengali is the mother tongue of 86 per cent, with Hindi, Santali, Urdu and Nepali the other large languages; Hindus are 70.5 per cent and Muslims 27.0 per cent, the third highest Muslim share among the states, concentrated in Murshidabad, Malda and Uttar Dinajpur; and Scheduled Castes are 23.5 per cent and Scheduled Tribes 5.8 per cent, the Santhals, Oraons, Mundas and Bhutias chiefly in the Rarh and the north.

The problems of the state's population are the highest density of any large state, the pressure on the tiny holdings of the delta, the unemployment that sends Bengali workers to Kerala, Gujarat and the Gulf, the slums of Kolkata, arsenic in the ground water of the delta districts, the strain on the Kolkata region's water, transport and housing, the erosion and cyclone risk of the Sundarbans and Malda, and the continued migration across the Bangladesh border; the responses are the family welfare programme that has brought fertility to 1.6, the Kanyashree and other schemes for girls' education, Sabuj Sathi bicycles for school children, the New Town and Siliguri satellite growth, and the development of the north and the west.

The Madhyamik examination tests this chapter with definitions, figures, reasons and the reading of tables and maps, and the student should practise each. The short-answer questions ask for the definition of density, sex ratio, literacy, urbanisation, migration, census town, demographic dividend or population explosion; the population of India in 2011, its density, growth rate, sex ratio and literacy rate; the most and least populous and dense states; the state with the highest sex ratio (Kerala) and the lowest (Haryana), the highest literacy (Kerala) and the lowest (Bihar); the year of the great divide (1921); the year of the family planning programme (1952); the number of million-plus cities (53); and the three megacities. The answer is one sentence with the exact figure.

The explanatory questions, of 3 to 5 marks, ask why population is unevenly distributed in India, why the Ganga plain or West Bengal is so dense and Arunachal or Rajasthan so sparse, why the sex ratio is low in India or high in Kerala, why literacy is high in Kerala or low in Bihar, what the causes and effects of migration or urbanisation are, what the problems of population growth are, what the measures of population control are, or how the demographic transition applies to India. The answer should define the term, give the causes or factors in order with a figure or a place for each, and end with a sentence of conclusion; a sketch map or a graph adds marks.

The data-reading questions give a table of states with population, area, density, sex ratio and literacy, or a graph of population growth, and ask the student to calculate a density (population ÷ area), a growth rate ((later − earlier) ÷ earlier × 100), a sex ratio (females ÷ males × 1,000) or a literacy rate (literates ÷ population aged 7+ × 100), or to identify the densest state, the state with the highest literacy or the decade of fastest growth, and to give one reason. The student should be fluent in the four formulas and careful with units: crore, lakh, sq km and per thousand.

The map-pointing questions ask for the most populous state (Uttar Pradesh), the densest state (Bihar), the least dense state (Arunachal Pradesh), the state with the highest sex ratio or literacy (Kerala), the state with the lowest sex ratio (Haryana), the three megacities (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata) or a million-plus city, and, in West Bengal questions, the densest district (Kolkata) and the sparsest (Purulia). A revision table with the top three and bottom three states for population, density, sex ratio, literacy and urbanisation, and a second table of India's and West Bengal's figures side by side, is the most efficient preparation.