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India's census confirms population passed 1 billion

By Associated Press, 3/26/2001 13:53

NEW DELHI, India (AP) The population of this poor nation has officially passed 1 billion, making India the second country after China to cross the billion mark, the census department said Monday.

There were an estimated 1.02 billion people in India on March 1, representing 16.7 percent of the world's population, the census report said, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. India's population in 1991 was 846 million.

In a much publicized event last year, the United Nations Population Fund and the government announced that India's population reached 1 billion on May 11.

That figure, however, was an estimate based on India's growth rate and did not reflect the India's actual population. The government staged the milestone as part of a public campaign to encourage Indians to have smaller families.

In the latest survey, however, more than 2 million census takers visited more than 200 million households during a three-week head count, covering 650,000 villages and 5,000 towns.

Since the last census was taken in 1991, India registered a 2.52 percent drop per decade in its growth rate, an increase in its literacy rate and a more equal distribution between men and women.

Three-quarters of the male population is now literate, as are more than half the women, the census showed. More than 65 percent of the population over the age of 7 is literate. And for the first time since India became independent from British colonial rule in 1947, the absolute number of illiterates has declined.

The population ratio between men and women evened somewhat, with 933 women per 1,000 men. In the 1991 census, there were 927 women for every 1,000 men in India.

Census operations in India were started in 1872 by British colonial rulers and have been held every 10 years since 1900.

-- Anonymous, March 26, 2001