Indian demography entails the population, ethnicity and status of the people, living in the diverse states of the nation. India is a country of great diversity with a wide range of landform types, including prime mountain ranges, deserts, loaded agricultural plains, and hilly jungle regions. Indian demography in a vast canvas includes population density, ethnicity, education level, and health of the population, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. However, the great variation that occurs across this population on social parameters such as income and education are also factors that determine Indian demography.
Indian subcontinent appropriately describes the massive extent of the earth`s surface that India occupies, and any effort to generalise its physiography is inaccurate. Diversity is also evident in the geographical distribution of India`s ethnic and linguistic groups. The demographics of India are remarkably diverse. India`s population of approximately 1.15 billion people (estimated in July, 2008) comprises approximately one-sixth of the world`s population. Moreover, India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented in this nation, as are the four major families of languages, namely the Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages, as well as a language isolate, the Nihali language that is spoken in parts of Maharashtra.
Indian demography states that the nation occupies 2.4% of the world`s land area and supports over 17.5% of the world`s population. India has more arable land area than any country except the United States. Indian lifestyle therefore revolves mostly around agriculture and associated activities in small villages. According to the 2001 census, 72.2% of the population lives in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% populates over 5,100 towns and over 380 urban settlements.
In the 1991 national census was taken, Indian demography stated approximately 846.3 million population. The annual population growth rate from 1981 to 1991 was 2 %, accounting for only 2.4 percent of the world`s land area. Every sixth person in the world during the early 1990s was an Indian. In July 1995, the population in India was estimated to be at 936.5 million.
According to the Indian demography, around 38 percent of all Indians were officially listed as living below the poverty line in 1991. This number represented an increase from the low mark of 26 percent in FY 1989. Although family planning programs have become integrated with the programs of urban and rural health clinics, no official birth control programs have widespread support in India. Improvements to the education system overall the nation have been substantial since 1947. In the mid-1990s, however, only about 50 percent of children between the ages of six and fourteen were enrolled in schools. Important achievements have been made in the domain of Indian demography, however, with implementation of the non-formal education system and adult education programs. High standards are maintained among the elite institutions in the higher education system.
According to the religious demographics of India, 80.5% of the Indians are Hindus, with 13.4% of the population Muslim, making India home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world. The Indian demography as per linguistics state that 40% of the Hindus speak Hindi while the rest speak Bangla, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada and other languages. Almost 70% of the Muslims speak Urdu while the rest speak Kashmiri, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati and other languages. Altogether, there are 1,652 languages and dialects spoken in India.
Indian Demographics, according to 2008, at a glance is given below -
Population - 1,147,995,904
Growth rate - 1.578%
Birth rate - 22.22 births/1,000 population
Death rate - 6.4 deaths/1,000 population
Life expectancy - 69.25 years
Male: 66.87 years
Female: 71.9 years
Fertility rate - 2.76 children born/woman
