Pudukkottai

With 16,18,345 people at the 2011 Census, Pudukkottai was the 309th most populous of India's 640 districts and the 22nd most populous of Tamil Nadu's 32. That is 2.2% of everyone living in Tamil Nadu at the time.

Literacy stood at 77.19%, 4.2 points above the national 72.98% — 2.9 points below the Tamil Nadu average. That ranked it 216th of 640 districts nationally. The gap between male and female literacy was 16.6 points, level with the national gap of 16.3.

The sex ratio was 1015 women per 1,000 men (19 above the Tamil Nadu figure of 996) — one of the minority of districts where women outnumbered men. Among children aged 0–6 the ratio was 960, 42 above the national 918.

Pudukkottai contained 16 towns — 10 with a municipal body of some kind, and 6 classed as census towns, meaning they met the census's urban test without having one. The largest was Pudukkottai (M), with 1,17,630 people. That put 19.6% of the district in urban areas, 28.8 points below the Tamil Nadu share of 48.4%.