The population of India’s commercial capital is growing very slowly in the suburbs while it is shrinking in the old city, the preliminary census data on Maharashtra released on Friday shows. Meanwhile, the population of adjoining Thane district has grown explosively at 35.9% between 2001 and 2011, as expensive real estate in the city has pushed people to satellite towns such as Kalyan and Vashi in this district. The shift in people...

Call it the curse of development. Kerala seems set to experience negative rate of growth of population, much like developed Europe and Japan in the recent decades, trends visible from the provisional results of Census 2011 suggest. The state recorded its slowest decadal increase in population of 4.8% between 2001 and 2011, or a compounded average annual growth rate of 0.48%. In contrast, the population of the country as a whole...

With the provisional figures for the 2011 Census sounding an alarm over the falling child sex ratio, it's a good time to look at who really is responsible for this. Who's committing female feticide and infanticide? Available figures show that it's not the poorest and least literate people and communities who are responsible; to the contrary, the reverse is true. The 2011 numbers show that the states with the worst child...

India's effective literacy rate has recorded a 9.2% rise to reach 74.04%, according to provisional data of the 2011 census released on Thursday. Even as there was a sense of achievement at the improvement in the literacy rate, questions are being raised about what constitutes literacy and the real import of the continued high gender gap. Literacy rate improved sharply among females as compared to males. While the effective literacy rate for...

India is now home to 17.5% of humanity, as the population touched 1.21 billion, up 17.4% from 2001, according to the provisional figures of the 2011 Census. The rate of growth of population showed a sharp downward trend, and fell 3.9 percentage points from 2001. The country posted its worst child sex ratio since independence, as the ugly preference for the male child in many parts of the country zoomed alongside...