Census India 1931: The Population Problem in Cochin

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This article is an extract from CENSUS OF INDIA, 1931 Report by J. H. HUTTON, C.I.E., D.Sc., F.A.S.B., Corresponding Member of the Anthropologische Gesselschaft of Vienna. Delhi: Manager of Publications 1933 (Hutton was the Census Commissioner for India) Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees with the contents of this article. Secondly, this has been scanned from a book. You can help by sending the corrected version/ additional information to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be duly acknowledged.

The Population Problem in Cochin

Cochin has an area of 1,480 square miles and a population of 1,205,016 persons, (females exceeding males) showing, over that recorded in 1921, an increase of 23.1 per cent., which the Census Superintendent regards as representing a real increase of 19 per cent.

The density is 814 to the square mile, but this is over the whole State, whereas more than a third is mountainous and the area includes the surface of the back waters, long stretches of salt water lagoon cut off from the sea by narrow tongues of land. In the mountainous forests of the Western Ghats the density is very low, as the inhabitants consist only of a few scattered jungle tribes and the forest officials, and if these areas be excluded from the forest taluks, the density of which is 365 to 975 when they are included, the density rises to 1,126, while the density of the coastal taluks excluding the lagoons in a similar manner. becomes 2,733, one village, covering an area of 3.8 sq. miles, having the incredible density of 4,090 persons to the sq. mile, for its inhabitants are not an urban population but a rural and agricultural one, the staple crops being coconut and rice, as in the case with most of the taluks of Cochin State.