Uttar Pradesh Population and Census 2011: Full Notes

One Indian in six lives in Uttar Pradesh. That single sentence explains why every examination that touches the state asks about its population, and why the figures of the Census of 2011 have to be known by heart. They are also safe figures to learn, because a census count does not change once it is published; what changes is only the estimate of today's population, which no paper asks for. This chapter sets out how a census is taken in India and what the last one found in Uttar Pradesh.

How a census is taken in India

The census is a Union subject, placed at entry 69 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, and it is carried out under the Census Act of 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs. It is taken every ten years, in two stages: house listing, in which every building and household is listed with its amenities and assets, and population enumeration, in which the people themselves are counted on a reference date. The first census of India was taken in 1872 in the time of Lord Mayo, but it was not taken everywhere on the same date; the first synchronous census was that of 1881, under Lord Ripon, with W. C. Plowden as the first Census Commissioner. The census of 2011 was the fifteenth in the series from 1872 and the seventh after independence. No census was held in 2021, the exercise having been postponed, and the Union Government has since notified the next census, in which caste is also to be recorded.

Two decades have names of their own. The decade from 1911 to 1921 is called the Great Divide, because the population of India fell in it, mainly on account of the influenza epidemic of 1918, and 1921 is therefore called the year of the great divide. The decade from 1941 to 1951 is called the year of the small divide, after which growth became rapid.

Uttar Pradesh in the Census of 2011

The districts at the top and at the bottom

The last row is the one students find odd and examiners therefore like. Gautam Buddha Nagar has the best literacy in the state and the worst sex ratio, because the industrial towns of Noida and Greater Noida draw in large numbers of working men who come without their families.

What the figures mean

Three things stand out. First, growth is slowing: the decadal increase of 20.23 per cent in 2001 to 2011 was lower than in the decade before it, and the fall is sharper in the western districts than in the eastern ones. Second, Uttar Pradesh is a rural state, with about four persons in five living in villages, so the pressure of population shows in the size of landholdings rather than in city slums alone. Third, the state has a young population, which is both an opportunity in the labour market and a burden on schools, and it sends more migrant workers to other states than any other part of the country.

The words the paper uses

• Density of population: the number of persons living on one square kilometre of land.
• Sex ratio: the number of females for every 1,000 males; the child sex ratio counts only children of nought to six years.
• Literacy rate: the share of persons aged seven years and above who can read and write with understanding.
• Decadal growth rate: the percentage increase in population over the ten years between two censuses.
• Reference date: the moment to which the count relates, so that persons are counted once and only once.