Demographics of India

India is the second most populous country in the world, with only China having a larger population. By 2030, India is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, estimated at 1.6 billion. Language, religion, and caste are major determinants of social and political organisation within the highly diverse Indian population today. Its biggest metropolitan agglomerations are Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Delhi, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and Chennai (formerly Madras).

India’s literacy rate is 64.8%, with 53.7% of females and 75.3% of males being literate. The sex ratio is 933 females for every 1000 males. Work Participation Rate (WPR) (the percentage of workers to total population) stands at 39.1%, with male WPR at 51.7% and female WPR at 25.6% India’s median age is 24.66, and has a growth rate of 22.32 births per 1,000.

India has no state religion. 80.5% of the people are Hindus, however, India is also home to the third largest population of Muslims in the world (13.4% see Islam in India), after Indonesia and Pakistan. Other smaller religious minorities include Christians (2.3%), Sikhs (1.84%), Buddhists (0.76%), Jains (0.40%), Jews, Zoroastrians, Ahmadis, and Baha’is.

India is home to two major linguistic families, the Indo-Aryan (spoken by about 74% of the Indian population) and Dravidian (spoken by about 24% of the Indian population). Other languages spoken in India come from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families. The Indian constitution recognises 23 official languages[1]. Hindi, along with English are the languages used by the Central Government for official purposes. Two classical languages native to the land are Sanskrit and Tamil. The number of mother tongues in India is as high as 1,652.

Although India occupies only 2.4% of the world’s land area, it supports over 15% of the world’s population. Only China has a larger population. Almost 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years of age. More than 70% of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 200 towns and cities. Over thousands of years of its history, India has had invasions from the the Middle East, Central Asia, and the West; Indian people and culture have absorbed and changed these influences to produce a remarkable racial and cultural synthesis.