Delhi: Economy
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Growth: 2001-2011
Delhi gobbled up villages to grow
One Third Of Population In Urbanized Villages In Lal Dora Areas That Doubled In Past Decade
Rukmini Shrinivasan TIG 2013/06/12
New Delhi: The capital’s growth in the decade 2001-11 has overwhelmingly come from the city swallowing up rural areas, newly released census data shows. The number of census towns—essentially newly urbanized villages in the lal dora areas—nearly doubled over the last decade, taking the proportion of Delhi’s residents who live in these areas to an unprecedented third of the population.
Varsha Joshi, director of census operations for Delhi, released the Primary Census Abstract for the National Capital Territory of Delhi on Tuesday. PCA gives the final population totals for every ward and village in NCT, as well as their literacy rates and sex ratios; provisional numbers were released last year.
The census redefines a village as a census town when it is densely populated and over three-quarters of its men work outside agriculture. In 2011, India had 3,894 census towns, home to half its urban population. The new numbers show that nearly 50 lakh people in Delhi, of a total population of 1.6 crore, live in census towns, which range in size from the 1,178-strong Shakarpur Baramad in east Delhi to Karawal Nagar, home to 2.24 lakh people, in north-east Delhi.
In 2001, 25 lakh people lived in Delhi’s census towns and they formed 18% of the population. By 2011, the proportion of rural residents in NCT had shrunk to just 2.5%. Simultaneously, the number of census nearly doubled to 110. About 30% of the NCT’s population now lives in these census towns. In fact, of the 29 lakh people added to Delhi’s population in the last decade, 24 lakh were added in census towns alone.
Of Delhi’s nine districts, north-west has seen the highest growth in population (22%) and is Delhi’s most populated district with over 36 lakh residents. Over 35% of the north-west lives in census towns. Saraswati Vihar in north-west Delhi has the highest population of any of the NCT’s 27 sub-divisions. Both New Delhi and central Delhi on the other hand have fewer residents than in 2001.
Population numbers at the ward level show that just four years after delimitation, the population of different wards varies wildly, from 1.5 lakh residents in Hastsal to just 15,000 in Kashmere Gate, which saw large-scale slum demolitions.
As The Times of India had reported earlier, Delhi has India’s lowest female workforce participation rate, with just 8.25 lakh women or roughly 10% reporting as workers. In contrast, there are 48 lakh male workers; over half of males across ages in the NCT report as workers. Seelampur reports the lowest female workforce participation of just over 5%. “We took a lot of steps to improve enumeration of women workers, but this is still what we have found. It’s really something we are worried about,” Joshi said. Over 95% of Delhi’s workers are ‘main workers’, meaning that they do economically productive work for over six months in the year. Connaught Place has the highest work participation rates for both men and women.
The proportion of scheduled castes in Delhi’s population has remained nearly constant at 16.75%.
Sex ratio in Delhi: 2011
In 2011 Delhi had a higher proportion of women in its population than it has had at any time in over a century. The sex ratio – number of females of all ages for every 1,000 males – was 868 in 2011, the first time that it has crossed 862, the previous highest set way back in 1901. This change has taken place despite no significant improvements in Delhi’s child sex ratio which stands at 871 girls for every 1,000 boys between the ages of 0 and 6. The figure for 2001 was only marginally lower at 868. There seemed to be more family migration taking place and fewer single male migrants, Varsha Joshi, director of census operations for Delhi, had said earlier. That could partly explain the dramatic improvement in the overall sex ratio between 2001, when it was 821, and 2011.
