INDIAN DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION 01. India is a federation of 28 states and 7 union territories within which 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers. Hindi is the most commonly spoken and the principal official language. English is a subsidiary official language. 02. From 2001 to 2011 India added 181 million people to its population, an addition just lower than the entire population of Brazil. India should overtake China as the world’s largest country by about 2020. 03. Malnutrition is more common in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. One in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. 04. Despite average annual GDP growth of 5.8 percent over the past two decades (10.4 percent in 2010) over three quarters of India’s population lives on less than 2 dollars income per day. 05. There are 53 Indian cities home to at least one million people, 18 more than the last census (2001). The number of Indian towns has increased by 2,774. 06. India’s rural and urban populations have increased by similar amounts in the last decade, 90.47 million and 91.00 million respectively. However, the respective growth rates were 12.18 percent and 31.80 percent. 07. The population of children age 0-6 years has fallen by 5 million since 2001 – a decline of 8.9 million in rural areas and an increase of 3.9 million in urban areas. 08. About 65 percent of Indians are of working age (15-64) and that proportion is growing. Over half of Indian workers (52 percent) are employed in agriculture. 09. Indians working abroad sent 55 billion dollars home in 2010 making India the world’s largest recipient of remittances. After Mexico, India was the country with the second largest number of emigrants (11.4 million). 10. Over 8 percent of India’s population (over 84 million people) is considered the country’s original, indigenous inhabitants. The ‘adivasis’ or tribal peoples are spread throughout the nation.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 06:53:55 +0000