Records second lowest literacy rate in the country The sex ratio in Arunachal Pradesh has improved to 920 females per 1000 males, up from 893 a decade ago, as per the provisional census report of 2011. The lowest sex ratio is in Tawang where the number of females was only 701 against 1,000 males though for the 0—6 years age group the number is 1,005. The provisional report, released here on Tuesday, put...

Armed with a clutch of numbers, drawing on raw data as well as intelligent guesswork, Leela Visaria had six years ago generated a figure for India’s population in 2011 that is closest to what the 2011 census has actually thrown up. Visaria, a demographer at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), an academic institution in Ahmedabad, had predicted that India’s population would grow to 1,204 million, just six million away...

Haryana Chief Secretary Urvashi Gulati said on Tuesday that the State Government is committed to safeguarding the interests of the girl child and providing equal opportunities to enable them to realise their full potential in life. Presiding over a meeting of Secretaries here, she asserted that even though the sex ratio figures of Census 2011 for Haryana which show an increase over the previous years appeared to be a ray of...

From the Prime Minister down, WikiLeaks has exposed the rotten state of the world's largest democracy for all to see. Food prices become intolerable for the poor. Protests against corruption paralyse Parliament. Then a series of American diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks exposes a brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class; the head of government adored by foreign business people and journalists loses his moral authority, turning into a lame duck. This...

India’s population of 1.2 billion, according to the 2011 decennial census, is growing at the century’s slowest rate of 17.6 per cent — four percentage points lower than in the previous decade. India is approaching, but has not yet reached, the replacement level. This means India’s population will stabilise somewhere between 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion by 2030, making it the world’s most populous country. It is hard to discern...