Transport, Population and Census

India has one of the largest road networks in the world, about 6 million km, second only to the United States. Roads carry most of our passengers and goods because they reach every village, which railways cannot do. The network is a ladder: National Highways at the top connect states and big cities, State Highways connect districts, District Roads connect towns and blocks, and Rural Roads connect villages. The paradox examiners love is this: National Highways are only about 2 per cent of the total road length, yet they carry roughly 40 per cent of the traffic.

The big national project to remember is the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ). It is a 6-lane highway ring of about 5,846 km that joins the four metros Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, launched in 1999 and built by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) as part of NHDP Phase I and II. Then come the North-South and East-West Corridors, the cross of India. The North-South Corridor joins Srinagar to Kanyakumari, and the East-West Corridor joins Silchar (Assam) to Porbandar (Gujarat). Together they make about 7,300 km. The latest push is Bharatmala Pariyojana (2017), which builds economic corridors, border roads, coastal roads and expressways.

Indian Railways is the backbone of long-distance travel and freight. It is the fourth-largest rail network in the world after the USA, China and Russia, with about 68,000 route km. The first passenger train ran on 16 April 1853 between Bombay (Bori Bunder) and Thane, a distance of 34 km, during the time of Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, whose policy of building a connected network earned him the name 'father of Indian Railways'. In 1951 the railways were nationalised and organised into zones, and the railway budget merged with the Union Budget in 2017.

Why is the Konkan Railway special? The Western Ghats fall straight into the sea along the Konkan coast, so there were no continuous rails along it. Konkan Railway Corporation Limited (formed 1990) built a 741 km line from Roha in Maharashtra to Mangaluru (Thokur) in Karnataka, passing through Goa too. It has hundreds of bridges and tunnels, and its project was led by E. Sreedharan (the 'Metro Man'). It opened in 1998 and shortened the Mumbai-Mangaluru journey by a great margin.

About 95 per cent of India's foreign trade by volume (and roughly 70 per cent by value) moves by sea, so ports are the doors through which our economy breathes. India has a coastline of about 7,516.6 km (older official figure; a 2025 re-measurement gives 11,098.81 km), touching nine coastal states and several Union Territories. A port is only as useful as its hinterland, the inland region it serves: the better the roads and railways behind it, the more cargo it handles. This is why the big ports sit at the mouths of rich hinterlands, such as iron ore in the east and the Gujarat-Maharashtra industrial belt in the west.

Ports are of two kinds. Major ports are owned and run by the Central Government (they fall under the Union List) and handle most of the traffic. Non-major (minor and intermediate) ports belong to the coastal state governments or to private companies. India has 12 major ports (as of 2025): six on the west coast and six on the east coast. A thirteenth, Vadhavan in Maharashtra, was approved in 2024 and is being developed. Since 2021 the Major Port Authorities Act has replaced the old Major Port Trusts Act of 1963 and given the ports greater freedom to take their own decisions.

Three recent ideas run through the whole port story. Sagarmala (launched in 2015 under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways) means 'garland of the sea': it modernises ports, connects them with roads and rail, and builds industry and jobs along the coast. Private and deep-water ports are being added: Vizhinjam in Kerala, India's first deep-water container transhipment port, was commissioned in 2025, so that our transhipment cargo no longer has to go to Colombo or Singapore. And shipbuilding is concentrated at Cochin Shipyard (which built INS Vikrant, the first indigenous aircraft carrier, commissioned in 2022), Mazagon Dock (Mumbai), Hindustan Shipyard (Visakhapatnam) and Garden Reach Shipbuilders (Kolkata).

Three modes of transport complete the picture. Air transport is the fastest and the most expensive, so it carries passengers, mail and high-value goods. Inland waterways are the slowest but the cheapest and cleanest for bulk cargo like coal, fertiliser and food grains. Pipelines are silent, continuous and safe, and they are the best way to move liquids and gases such as crude oil, petroleum products and natural gas over land. Each has its own institution, its own famous routes and its own favourite exam questions.

Start with the air. Indian aviation began in 1911 when the first air-mail flight carried letters across the Yamuna at Allahabad. On 15 October 1932 J.R.D. Tata flew the first scheduled commercial flight from Karachi to Bombay, and his Tata Airlines became Air India in 1946. In 1953 the Air Corporations Act nationalised eight private airlines and merged them into two corporations: Indian Airlines for domestic routes and Air India for international ones. The two were merged in 2007, and in January 2022 the Tata Group took Air India back. India today is among the largest domestic aviation markets in the world.

The UDAN scheme (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik, 2016, also called the Regional Connectivity Scheme) makes small-town flights affordable by capping fares on part of the seats and supporting airlines. The first UDAN flight was Shimla-Delhi in April 2017. In the 2025-26 Budget the scheme was reshaped to connect 120 new destinations over ten years. Remember the idea: aviation should be for the common citizen and not only for the rich.

Now the waterways. India has about 14,500 km of navigable inland waterways: rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI), formed in 1986 with its headquarters at Noida, develops and regulates them. The National Waterways Act, 2016 declared 111 national waterways, up from the five declared earlier. Those first five are the ones examiners ask about, so learn them as a set.

The big push on NW-1 is the Jal Marg Vikas Project, built with World Bank help, which aims to let ships of 1,500 to 2,000 tonnes sail between Varanasi and Haldia. Multimodal terminals have been built at Varanasi, Sahibganj (Jharkhand) and Haldia. Across the border, an Indo-Bangladesh Protocol lets Indian cargo travel on Bangladesh's rivers. And the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project links Kolkata by sea to Sittwe in Myanmar, then by the Kaladan river and by road into Mizoram, giving the north-east a route that avoids the narrow Siliguri corridor.

Finally, pipelines. India's oil and gas fields are in a few places (Assam, Gujarat, Mumbai offshore, the Krishna-Godavari basin) while refineries and fertiliser plants are far away, so long pipelines connect them. The first major cross-country crude pipeline ran from Naharkatiya (Assam) through Nunmati to Barauni (Bihar) in the 1960s, feeding the Barauni refinery. The most important gas pipeline is the HBJ (Hazira-Bijaipur-Jagdishpur), built by GAIL in the 1980s from Gujarat through Madhya Pradesh to Uttar Pradesh to supply fertiliser and power plants. Recent pipelines cross borders: the Motihari-Amlekhgunj pipeline (2019) carries petroleum products from Bihar to Nepal, and the Numaligarh-Parbatipur pipeline (2023) carries diesel from Assam to Bangladesh.

A census is the count of every single person in the country on a fixed date, together with facts about them: age, sex, work, education, language, housing. It is different from a sample survey (like NFHS, NSS or the SRS), which asks only a few households and then estimates for everybody. In India the census is run by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, an office under the Ministry of Home Affairs, under the Census Act, 1948; the subject is Entry 69 of the Union List. It is held every ten years, in two phases: first a houselisting of buildings and households, then the population enumeration of people. Census 2011 was the 15th census in India's history and the 7th since Independence, with the slogan 'Our Census, Our Future'.

Look at the bars and you can see the whole story of India's population in one glance. The line is flat until 1921, climbs steadily until 1951, then shoots up. Demographers therefore divide the twentieth century into four phases. The reason behind each phase is the same tug of war between the birth rate and the death rate: when deaths fall faster than births, the population explodes.

A falling growth rate does not mean a falling population. In 2001-11 the growth rate dropped to about 17.7 per cent, yet India still added roughly 18 crore people, because the base is huge. Growth rate is a percentage; population is a number. India overtook China as the most populous country in 2023 (UN estimates).

Two words are often confused. Distribution tells us where people live: crowded in some places, almost empty in others. Density puts a number on it: persons per square kilometre. India's density in Census 2011 was 382, up from 325 in 2001 and only 117 in 1951. The national figure hides huge differences: Bihar has more than a thousand people on every square kilometre, while Arunachal Pradesh has just 17.

Arithmetic density is total population divided by total area, the density we have been using. Physiological density is population divided by cultivable land, and shows the real pressure on farmland. Agricultural density is the farm population divided by the net sown area. A mountainous state can look sparse on the first measure and crowded on the second, because only a thin strip of its land can be farmed.

Now the other side of settlement: urbanisation. In Census 2011, 31.16 per cent of Indians lived in towns and cities (27.81 per cent in 2001), and 68.84 per cent in villages. The census recognises two kinds of towns. Statutory towns are places that have a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee. Census towns have no such body but satisfy three tests: population of at least 5,000, at least 75 per cent of male main workers in non-farm work, and a density of at least 400 per sq km. In 2011 there were 7,935 towns: 4,041 statutory and 3,894 census towns. A continuous built-up area, a town together with its outgrowths, is an urban agglomeration.

The census tells us not only how many we are but who we are. Three portraits matter most: the sex ratio (how balanced are men and women), literacy (how many can read and write) and the age structure (how young or old is the country). In India the sex ratio is counted as females per 1,000 males, which is the opposite of the 'males per 100 females' used in many countries. A ratio below 1,000 means fewer women than men. India's was 943 in 2011 (933 in 2001).

A low sex ratio is a social signal more than a biological one. It reflects son preference, sex-selective abortion and neglect of girl children. The law against it is the PCPNDT Act, 1994, which bans sex determination before birth, and the campaign is Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, launched in 2015 from Panipat, Haryana. Kerala's high ratio goes with high female literacy and a matrilineal history; Daman and Diu's very low ratio comes from migrant male workers, not from discrimination.

Now literacy. In the census a person is literate if aged 7 years or above and able to read and write with understanding in any language. Just signing one's name does not count, and knowing a language other than English or Hindi counts equally. The effective literacy rate divides literates by the population aged 7 and above (this is the figure we quote); the crude rate divides by the total population. India's literacy rose from 18.33 per cent in 1951 to 74.04 per cent in 2011: male 82.14, female 65.46, so women still trail men by about 17 points.

Third, the age structure. Demographers split people into three groups: 0 to 14 (children, who depend on others), 15 to 59 (the working-age group) and 60 and above (the elderly, who also depend). The dependency ratio is dependants divided by the working-age group. When the working-age group is large and the dependants few, a country enjoys a demographic dividend: more earners than mouths to feed. India is in that window now, and the 15-59 group was the largest in 2011. The dividend only pays off if those young people get education and jobs.