Methodology

All figures on this site are drawn from the Census of India 2011 Primary Census Abstract, covering the 35 states and union territories as enumerated at the time of that census.

Where a published national figure differs from the abstract, the abstract wins. National literacy is stated here as 72.98%, the final 2011 figure computed from the abstract — not the widely quoted 74.04%, which came from the provisional release. Mixing the two would make the state and national numbers on this site disagree with each other.

India has not held a census since 2011 (the 2021 census was delayed and has not yet taken place), so every number here is a historical actual from the 2011 count, not a projection. This site does not model current-year population estimates.

Rates and ratios are derived from raw counts rather than copied from summary tables. Literacy follows the census definition — literates as a share of the population aged 7 and over, not of the whole population. Sex ratio is females per 1,000 males; the child sex ratio uses ages 0–6. Work participation counts main and marginal workers together.

Every denominator is guarded against zero, because the census records genuinely uninhabited units — a village with no population has no household size, and that is recorded as unavailable rather than as zero.

Two significant reorganisations happened after this data was collected: Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, and Jammu & Kashmir was reorganised into two union territories (Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh) in 2019. This site shows the 35 states and union territories as they existed in 2011 — it does not reflect these later changes.

The homepage map uses state boundary geometry derived from geohacker/india, a community GADM-derived dataset, simplified for web delivery. It was chosen because its 35-entity split matches this site's 2011 Census boundaries exactly (no Telangana, no separate Ladakh) — most current India boundary files use the post-2019 36-entity split and wouldn't line up with the data.

Known gap:we have not verified that this dataset's lines for Jammu & Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh match the Survey of India's official boundary depiction — GADM-style sources typically plot the de facto Line of Control / Line of Actual Control rather than India's official claim line. Treat the shapes for those two states as approximate.

18 indicators are published for all 35 states and union territories, and 16 of them for all 640 districts.

Population density, land area and decadal growth are unavailable at district level. This is a limit of the source, not a gap awaiting ingestion: the Primary Census Abstract carries no land area, so density cannot be computed, and decadal growth would require the 2001 Census matched across districts that have since been split and renamed. State figures for both come from land-area and 2001 figures held separately. Rather than estimate them, district pages state that they are not available.

Sub-district, town, village and ward data exist in the ingested dataset but are not yet published as pages. City-level pages, religion breakdowns and a public data API remain planned.

Census figures are loaded into a local PostgreSQL database from the published 2011 Primary Census Abstract workbooks, not hand-typed into the site. The raw abstract lands unmodified in census_units (the administrative hierarchy) and pca_records (all 85 published indicators, per Total/Rural/Urban breakdown); rates and ratios are derived from those counts in the pca_metrics view rather than stored. Land area and decadal growth, which the abstract does not carry, live alongside slugs in states and districts. A sync step exports that database into the typed data files the site builds from, and the exported snapshot is what ships — the live site doesn't query a database at request time.

The load is verified on every run: rural and urban figures must reconcile to the total for every unit, districts must sum to their state and states to India, and male plus female must equal the total on all 19,992 records.

Census of India data is published by the Government of India and is publicly available for reuse. This site adds presentation, derived rankings, and comparison tooling on top of that public data. Census360 is not an official government publication.