India Population Passes 1 BillionThe population of India 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. |
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