Haryana Population and Sex Ratio: Census 2011 Facts

Haryana is one of India's smallest states by area and one of its richest by income, and it carries a population record that examiners return to again and again: the lowest sex ratio among the states in the Census of 2011. Papers set by the HSSC, the HPSC, the SSC and the railways ask the same handful of figures from this topic. How many people does the state have, how fast did they grow, how many women are there for every thousand men, and which district stands at each extreme. This note collects those figures and explains the census system that produces them.

How India counts its people

A census is a complete count of every person present in the country on a fixed reference date. The first census in India was taken in 1872 under Lord Mayo, but it was not taken everywhere on the same night. The first synchronous census was held in 1881 under Lord Ripon, and the count has been repeated every ten years since then. Census is a Union subject, entry 69 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, and the operation is carried out under the Census Act, 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The census of 2011 was the fifteenth since 1872 and the seventh after independence. Two census years carry names of their own. The year 1921 is called the Year of the Great Divide, because India's population actually fell in the decade before it, and 1951 is called the Year of the Small Divide.

Haryana in the Census of 2011

Haryana covers 44,212 square kilometres, about 1.34 per cent of the area of India, and held about 2.09 per cent of its people in 2011. The state therefore packs more people into each square kilometre than the country as a whole, whose density was 382. Its decadal growth of 19.90 per cent was also faster than the national figure of 17.70 per cent, and almost all of that extra growth came from the districts around Delhi.

The sex ratio, and why it is asked

In Indian practice the sex ratio is written as the number of females for every thousand males, which is the reverse of the convention used in many other countries. Haryana recorded 879 in 2011, the lowest of any state, although it was an improvement on the 861 of 2001. The national figure was 943, Kerala stood highest among the states at 1,084 and Puducherry highest among the union territories at 1,037, while Daman and Diu recorded the lowest figure in the country. More worrying than the overall ratio is the child sex ratio for the age group of zero to six years, where Haryana recorded 834 against a national figure of 919, the lowest of any state. The child sex ratio is read as a measure of what is happening now, because it cannot be changed by migration of adult workers into the state.

Districts at the extremes

The pattern behind the table is simple. The districts of the National Capital Region, Faridabad and Gurgaon, grew on industry and offices and so lead in numbers, density, literacy and growth, while Mewat, the poorest district, leads only in sex ratio. The lowest district sex ratios of 2011 were in Gurgaon and Sonipat, both in the eight hundred and fifties.

Literacy, towns and social groups

Literacy in Haryana stood at 75.55 per cent, a little above the national 74.04 per cent, but the gap between the sexes was wide: 84.06 per cent for men against 65.94 per cent for women. About 34.79 per cent of the people lived in towns, against 31.16 per cent for India, so Haryana is more urban than the average state. Scheduled Castes formed 20.17 per cent of the population. Haryana has no notified Scheduled Tribes at all, which is a favourite one-line question, and it is the reason the state has no reserved tribal seats in its Vidhan Sabha.

What is being done about the ratio

The law against sex selection is the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994, which bans the disclosure of the sex of a foetus. The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme was launched on 22 January 2015 from Panipat in Haryana, and the choice of Panipat was deliberate, because the state had the worst child sex ratio in the country. State schemes such as Aapki Beti Hamari Beti and Ladli work in the same direction by paying cash to families with daughters.