The Demographic Structure of the Indian Society

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: Population is where sociology meets numbers, and GS1 asks about it every few years: why prosperous regions have adverse sex ratios, whether population causes poverty or poverty causes population growth, what a "demographic winter" is, and whether empowering women is the key to slowing growth. GS2 adds the demographic dividend and the skills it needs. NCERT's chapter gives the concepts (birth, death and fertility rates, replacement level, dependency ratio, sex ratio), the two classic theories (Malthus and the demographic transition) and India's record from 1901 to 2011. The 2026-27 reprint keeps the chapter almost unchanged, updating only the birth-rate paragraph to the Sample Registration System report for 2020. Most of its tables stop at Census 2011, so this page sets the latest official figures beside them.

Contemporary hook: India's fertility has fallen below replacement. The Registrar General's SRS Statistical Report 2024 puts the total fertility rate at 1.9 (rural 2.1, urban 1.5), the birth rate at 18.3 and infant mortality at 24 per 1,000 live births; NFHS-6 (2023-24, released 29 May 2026) has a TFR of 2.0. The UN's World Population Prospects 2024 shows India passing China in 2022 and growing to about 1,680 million in 2050 before peaking around 1,701 million in 2061. The census that would show this directly has not been taken since 2011: the 2021 round was never held, and Census 2027 is in progress.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

A rate is a social fact even though it is made of individual events. Every birth and death happens to a person, but the death rate or suicide rate of a country is a property of the society. NCERT uses Émile Durkheim's study of suicide to make the point: suicide rates varied across countries in ways that individual reasons could not explain, so the rate needed a social explanation. This is why aggregate statistics, which emerged with the modern state's need to count its people, gave sociology its strongest early argument for the existence of social phenomena.

Death rates fall fast; birth rates fall slowly; the gap between them is the population explosion. Disease control, public health and famine relief can cut mortality within decades. Fertility depends on what families believe about children, marriage and the future, which changes only as education, prosperity and child survival improve. The demographic transition theory turns this into three stages: high birth and death rates (low growth), a transitional stage in which death rates have fallen but birth rates have not (very high growth), and low birth and death rates (low growth again). NCERT's verdict, written before the latest data, was that India's transition "is not yet complete".

Numbers carry social norms. India's sex ratio has declined for more than a century, and the child sex ratio fell steeply after 1961. NCERT rejects explanations from poverty or maternal mortality: the lowest child sex ratios are in the most prosperous regions, so the cause lies in son preference, sex-selective abortion, neglect of girl babies and infanticide. The same logic runs through literacy and fertility. Demography measures outcomes; sociology asks which social arrangements produce them.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

NCERT's Core Concepts

India's Latest Figures Beside NCERT's

NCERT Table 1: Population and Growth, 1901-2011

Source: NCERT, Indian Society, ch. 2, Table 1.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Demography and Why Sociology Needs It

Demography (Greek demos, people, and graphein, describe) is the systematic study of population: its size, births, deaths and migration, and its composition by sex and age. NCERT distinguishes formal demography, a quantitative field with mathematical tools for measuring and forecasting population change, from population studies or social demography, which asks about the wider social, economic and political causes and consequences of population trends. Social demographers believe "social processes and structures regulate demographic processes".

NCERT ties the field's birth to two developments in late eighteenth-century Europe: the nation-state, whose growing functions (public health, policing, taxation, city government) needed regular social statistics, and the modern science of statistics. The American census of 1790 was "probably the first modern census". In India, the British Indian government conducted censuses between 1867 and 1872 and regular ten-yearly censuses from 1881; independent India held seven decennial censuses from 1951 to 2011. NCERT adds that China "does not conduct regular censuses", which is not correct: China's National Bureau of Statistics reports a sixth national census in 2010 and a seventh with a reference date of 1 November 2020, which counted 1,411.78 million people. India's next census, Census 2027, is in progress.

Malthus: Population Against Subsistence

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), in his Essay on Population (1798), argued that population grows in geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while agricultural production grows only in arithmetic progression (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). Humanity is therefore condemned to poverty unless population growth is controlled. Voluntary preventive checks (postponing marriage, abstinence, celibacy) have limited effect, so positive checks (famines and diseases) are inevitable, nature's way of restoring the balance. NCERT's Box 2.1 notes that Malthus later taught at the East India Company College at Haileybury, which trained officers for the Indian Civil Service.

NCERT gives three answers to Malthus:

1. History refuted him. From the late nineteenth century, European birth rates fell and epidemics came under control; food production and living standards kept rising despite rapid population growth.
2. Economists argued growth could outstrip population.
3. Liberal and Marxist critics said poverty and starvation came from the unequal distribution of resources, not from population growth: an unjust social system let a privileged minority live in luxury while most people lived in poverty.

This debate is the frame for a GS1 question that asks whether population causes poverty or poverty causes population growth: Malthus gives the first answer, his critics and the transition theory the second.

The Theory of Demographic Transition

The transition theory links population growth to economic development. Every society passes through three stages:

1. Low growth in an underdeveloped society: both birth and death rates are very high, so the difference between them is small.
2. Transitional stage, the "population explosion": death rates fall quickly through disease control, public health and better nutrition, but it takes longer for society to change reproductive behaviour formed in a time of poverty and high mortality.
3. Low growth in a developed society: both rates are low, and the difference is again small.

Western Europe made this transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; less developed countries are "struggling to reduce the birth rate in keeping with the falling mortality rate". India's Chart 1 in NCERT shows birth and death rates diverging after 1921-31. NCERT's box on India's transition (citing the Planning Commission, 2008) adds that from 1950 to 1990 the birth rate fell more slowly than the death rate, but in the 1990s the birth rate fell faster, bringing growth down to about 1.6% a year.

Where India stands now is a question the latest figures help answer. The SRS 2024 national TFR of 1.9 is below replacement, with sixteen of the bigger States and UTs below 2.1, yet the population keeps growing because of population momentum, which NCERT's box explains: a large cohort of women of reproductive age fuels growth for a generation even if each has fewer children. The UN's medium projection has India's population rising to about 1,680 million in 2050 and peaking around 1,701 million in 2061. NCERT's own box projected 1.6 billion by 2050.

India's Growth Since 1901

Between 1901 and 1951 the average annual growth rate never exceeded 1.33%. Between 1911 and 1921 growth was negative (-0.03% a year), because the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 killed about 5% of the population. After independence growth rose to about 2.2% a year in 1961-81 and then declined, though NCERT notes it remained one of the highest in the developing world.

NCERT gives three different death tolls for the influenza epidemic in the same chapter: about 12.5 million (citing Visaria and Visaria), "as many as 170 lakh" (17 million), and an estimated 17 million in Box 2.2, all described as about 5% of the population. Its own note that "estimates of deaths vary" is the safest reading; quote a range rather than one figure.

Death rates fell after 1921 because famines and epidemics were brought under control. The great epidemics were fevers, plague, smallpox and cholera; mass vaccination, medical cures and sanitation reduced them, though malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoea and dysentery still kill, and Surat had a small plague epidemic in September 1994. Famines came from continuing poverty and malnutrition in a rainfall-dependent environment, poor transport and inadequate state effort. NCERT cites Amartya Sen: famines were caused not only by falling food output but by a "failure of entitlements", people's inability to buy or otherwise obtain food. Irrigation, better communications and state relief reduced famine deaths. NCERT calls the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act "the latest state initiative" against rural hunger; that Act was repealed from 1 July 2026 and replaced by the Viksit Bharat - Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, which guarantees 125 days of work.

Why the Birth Rate Falls Slowly

The birth rate "is a sociocultural phenomenon that is relatively slow to change". Prosperity pulls it down, and family size falls once infant mortality declines and education and awareness rise. The regional range is wide. NCERT's figures for 2016 put Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal at a TFR of 1.7 and Kerala below replacement, while Bihar (3.3), Uttar Pradesh (3.1), Madhya Pradesh (2.8) and Rajasthan (2.7) remained high. By 2024 the same four were at 2.9, 2.6, 2.4 and 2.3, and Delhi (1.2), Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal (1.3 each) were lowest. NCERT also cites the Economic Survey 2018-19: Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together were projected to account for 28% of population additions to 2041 (Uttar Pradesh alone 22%), and its Chart 2 gives each regional group's share.

Age Structure and the Demographic Dividend

India has a very young population. The share of children under 15 fell from a peak of 42% in 1971 to 29% in 2011; the working-age 15-59 group rose from 53% to 63%; the 60+ share rose from 5% to 8%. NCERT's projection for 2026: 23% under 15, 64% aged 15-59 and 12% aged 60+ (Table 2). The age pyramids for 1961, 1981, 2001 and 2026 show the base narrowing as births fall and the top widening as people live longer, with a "bulge" in the working ages. Kerala's projected 2026 pyramid already resembles a developed country's, while Uttar Pradesh's is still broad at the base.

Source: NCERT, Indian Society, ch. 2, Table 2 (Technical Group on Population Projections, National Commission on Population). Rows may not add to 100 because of rounding.

NCERT's Box 2.3 (adapted from C.P. Chandrasekhar, Frontline, 2006) explains the demographic dividend. A third of India's population was under 15 in 2011, and in 2020 the average Indian was 29 years old, against 37 in China and the United States, 45 in Western Europe and 48 in Japan (the UN puts India's median age at 28.8 in 2025, China's at 40.1). A falling dependency ratio, the ratio of non-working-age to working-age people, creates the potential for growth: the age-based ratio fell from 79 in 1970 to 64 in 2005, and was projected to fall to 48 in 2025 before rising to 50 by 2050 as the population ages.

The box's central argument is that the dividend is not automatic. It becomes real only if new workers are educated and employed; unemployed workers are dependents, not earners. "The real problem is in defining the dependency ratio as the ratio of the non-working age to working-age population, rather than the ratio of non-workers to workers." The box cited a fall in employment growth for men aged 15-30 from about 2.4% a year (1987-94) to 0.7% for rural men and 0.3% for urban men (1994-2004), and warned that market forces alone would not capture the dividend. The latest labour data show why participation matters: the Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2025 puts the labour force participation rate (15+) at 59.3%, with 79.1% for men but only 40.0% for women.

The Declining Sex Ratio

India's sex ratio fell from 972 females per 1,000 males in 1901 to 933 in 2001, with an all-time low of 927 in 1991, and rose to 943 in 2011. The child sex ratio (0-6 years), computed from 1961, fell faster: 976 (1961) to 945 (1991), 927 (2001) and 919 (2011). In 1991-2001 the overall ratio posted its largest ever rise (+6) while the child ratio plunged 18 points and fell below the overall ratio for the first time.

Source: NCERT, Indian Society, ch. 2, Table 3 (Census of India). NCERT labels 2011's 919 "provisional"; it is the final Census figure (the provisional release gave 914).

At State level NCERT says nine States and UTs were below 900 and names Haryana "the worst state with an incredibly low child sex ratio of 793 (the only state below 800)". That figure is wrong for 2011: the final Census figure for Haryana is 834, followed by Punjab at 846; no State was below 800. NCERT's other values check out against the Census: Kerala 964 and Arunachal Pradesh 972, the highest.

NCERT's explanation proceeds by elimination. Childbearing is the main health risk that affects women alone, but maternal mortality falls with development, so it cannot explain a ratio that worsened as India developed. The steeper fall in the child ratio points to differential treatment of girls: severe neglect of girl babies, sex-selective abortion (ultrasound, developed to detect foetal disorders, "misused to identify and selectively abort female foetuses") and female infanticide. The regional pattern clinches it: "the lowest child sex ratios are found in the most prosperous regions of India", including Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh and Delhi, so selective abortion "is not due to poverty or ignorance or lack of resources". Prosperous families who want only one or two children may also want to choose their sex.

The law against sex selection, which NCERT calls the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, has been in force since 1996 and was strengthened in 2003, when it was renamed the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994. It prohibits sex determination and sex selection; abortion itself is governed by a separate law. NCERT concludes that the long-run solution "depends more on how social attitudes evolve", and mentions Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao. The latest data point is the SRS sex ratio at birth of 918 for 2022-24 (rural 914, urban 928), ranging from 978 in Chhattisgarh to 872 in Uttarakhand.

Literacy

Literacy "as a prerequisite to education is an instrument of empowerment": it widens career options, health awareness and participation. NCERT's Table 4 (age 7+) shows the rise from 18.3% in 1951 (men 27.2, women 8.9) to 73.0% in 2011 (men 80.9, women 64.6), and the gender gap narrowing from a peak of 26.6 points (1981) to 16.3 (2011).

Source: NCERT, Indian Society, ch. 2, Table 4 (Bose 2001; Census of India 2011).

NCERT's text gets its own table's arithmetic wrong in one place: it says female literacy rose 10.4 points in 2001-11 "compared to the rise in male literacy of 7.6 per cent". Table 4 gives a male rise of 5.0 points (75.9 to 80.9); 7.6 is the rise for all persons (65.4 to 73.0). The next sentence of NCERT's text gives the correct rounded figures. Literacy also varies by social group (Scheduled Castes and Tribes lower, their women lower still) and region (Kerala 94.0% against Bihar 61.8% in 2011), and these inequalities reproduce themselves because illiterate parents struggle to educate their children.

Rural-Urban Differences

In 2011, 68.8% of Indians lived in rural areas and 31.2% in urban areas; the urban share has risen from about 11% in 1901 (Table 5). NCERT's argument is that the agrarian way of life loses economic and social significance even while most people still live in villages: agriculture contributes only about one-sixth of GDP, more villagers work outside agriculture, and mass media carry urban consumption norms into villages.

NCERT names several forces pushing people to cities: lack of work, the decline of common property resources (ponds, forests, grazing lands that let the landless survive, now privatised or exhausted), and the cash needed to buy what was once free (fuel, fodder, food). The city also offers social advantages, chiefly anonymity: for Scheduled Castes and Tribes it gives partial protection from daily humiliation in villages where everyone knows their caste, and it lets poorer members of dominant rural groups take low-status work they could not do at home. The biggest cities grow fastest.

NCERT's urban figures in this paragraph ("5,161 towns and cities in India, where 286 million people live", with "more than two-thirds" of them "in 27 big cities with million-plus populations") are older than its own tables: Table 5 gives 286 million as the urban population of 2001. Census 2011 counted 7,935 towns and 377 million urban residents, and NCERT's geography book lists 53 million-plus cities and agglomerations for 2011.

Population Policy in India

India "was perhaps the first country to explicitly announce" a population policy, in 1952, as the National Family Planning Programme, aimed at slowing growth through birth control, better public health and awareness. It suffered a setback during the Emergency, when the government ran a coercive programme of mass sterilisation (vasectomy and tubectomy) with heavy pressure on low-level officials to fill camps; "vast numbers of mostly poor and powerless people were forcibly sterilised". NCERT dates the Emergency "1975-76" in this chapter and "June 1975 and January 1977" in chapter 6; the proclamation under Article 352 ran from 25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977. After the Emergency the new government abandoned coercion and renamed the programme the National Family Welfare Programme. The National Population Policy, 2000 set new guidelines, and the National Health Policy, 2017 folded the socio-demographic goals into health targets (Box 2.5), among them a TFR of 2.1 nationally and in every State by 2025, life expectancy of 70 by 2025, under-five mortality of 23 by 2025 and a 40% reduction in under-five stunting by 2025.

Set against the latest data, the TFR goal has been met nationally (SRS 2024: 1.9; NFHS-6: 2.0), though Bihar (2.9), Uttar Pradesh (2.6), Madhya Pradesh (2.4) and Rajasthan (2.3) remain above 2.1. Under-five mortality was 28 in 2024 (SRS), above the target of 23. Stunting fell from 35.5% (NFHS-5) to 29.3% (NFHS-6), a fall of about a sixth in four years, still short of a 40% reduction. NCERT's closing lesson holds: the state can create conditions for demographic change, but fertility in particular is "ultimately" a matter of "economic, social and cultural change".

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Frames That Score

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: definitions (birth rate per 1,000 population; fertility rate per 1,000 women aged 15-49; infant mortality per 1,000 live births; maternal mortality per 1,00,000 live births; dependency ratio); Malthus's progressions and checks; 1921 as the only census decade of negative growth; 1952 policy; the PCPNDT Act's full title; the latest SRS figures (TFR 1.9, IMR 24, CBR 18.3).

For Mains: name the source and year with every figure (Census 2011, SRS 2024, NFHS-6, UN WPP 2024). Use NCERT's argument structure for sex-ratio questions and Box 2.3's conditions for dividend questions.

Avoid: NCERT's "793" for Haryana (the Census figure is 834); calling 919 provisional; quoting 2001 urban figures as current; "India is the second most populous country"; saying the Emergency was 1975-76.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains questions 1 to 4 adapt NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. Consider the following statements:
   

   1. The fertility rate is the number of live births per 1,000 women in the age group 15-49 years.
      
   2. The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths of babies before the age of one year per 1,000 live births.
      
   3. The dependency ratio compares the population below 15 and above 64 with the population aged 15-64.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only
      (b) 2 and 3 only
      (c) 1 and 3 only
      (d) 1, 2 and 3

2. In which census decade did India's population record negative growth?
   (a) 1901-1911
   (b) 1911-1921
   (c) 1921-1931
   (d) 1941-1951

3. According to the Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2024, India's total fertility rate was:
   (a) 2.2
   (b) 2.1
   (c) 2.0
   (d) 1.9

4. In Malthus's theory, which of the following is a "preventive check" on population growth?
   (a) Famine
   (b) Epidemic disease
   (c) Postponing marriage
   (d) War

Mains:

1. Explain the basic argument of the theory of demographic transition. Why is the transition period associated with a "population explosion"? (150 words)
2. Why is the birth rate slow to fall while the death rate declines much faster? Illustrate with India's experience. (150 words)
3. Which States of India have reached replacement-level fertility and which have not? What could explain the regional differences? (250 words)
4. What is meant by the sex ratio? Why are the lowest child sex ratios found in some of India's most prosperous regions? (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Indian Society (Class XII), ch. 2 "The Demographic Structure of the Indian Society", Tables 1-5 and Boxes 2.1-2.5 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• NCERT, India: People and Economy (Class XII), Table 4.3 (million-plus cities, Census 2011): 2026-27 book archive.
• Office of the Registrar General of India, Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2024 (executive summary; Statement 24, TFR by State): SRS_STAT_2024.pdf.
• Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Census of India 2011, Primary Census Abstract: Data Highlights, India, chapter 1 (child sex ratio): chapter 1, Wayback copy; Primary Census Abstract, State tables (Haryana and Punjab child sex ratios, Kerala and Bihar literacy computed): Census Digital Library catalogue.
• PIB (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs), Census 2011 towns, 6 March 2013: pib.gov.in.
• PIB (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare), release of the National Family Health Survey-6 (2023-24), 29 May 2026: pib.gov.in.
• UN DESA Population Division, World Population Prospects 2024, demographic indicators (medium variant): population.un.org/wpp; World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results, Tables A3-A4: desapublications.un.org.
• Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Periodic Labour Force Survey, annual report 2025, press note: PIB release.
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, Communiqué on the Seventh National Population Census (No. 1), 11 May 2021: Wayback copy.
• PIB backgrounder, "Historic Operationalisation of the VB-G RAM G Act Across All Rural Areas of the Country", 11 May 2026: static.pib.gov.in PDF.
• PCPNDT Act title (as amended by Act 14 of 2003): Indian Kanoon.