About Two Third of India’s population is in Productive age as per 2011 Census with median age of 24 years

Not only is the bulk of India’s population, nearly two-thirds, in the working age group from 15-65 years, the median age of the country is just 24 years. In 2001, the working age population constituted 60% of the total, while median age was 22. It makes India a young country with a large potentially productive workforce and that too has increased during last decade. On both counts, however, there are wide variations across states. While India might have 780.6 million people in the working age group, the proportion of working age population varies widely among various States/UTs. 

For India, the proportion of children (0-14 years) is 31%. In low fertility states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, children constitute just 23% and 24% of the population.  Of the larger states, Tamil Nadu has the highest proportion (about 71%) of population in the working age.  Goa has 72 percent of its population in the working age.

In general, among the larger states, the list of states with a high proportion of the population in the working age bracket overlaps a lot with the list of states generally considered among the comparatively more developed. This is good to witness as they are better placed to make the ‘demographic dividend’ pay than others. But it is not so good news that most urgently needing states like UP and Bihar, haven’t really got much of the dividend.
This information emerges from the single year age data from 2011 census, which showed the number of people at each year of age, from zero to 100+, in the population.

The median age of the various states also vary with fast aging Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu, registering the highest median age of 31, 30 and 29 years respectively, at higher end and Bihar and Meghalaya recording the lowest median age of 19 years.  In most cases, states with a higher median age also register a higher proportion of working age population, such as Himachal (27 years) and Punjab (26 years), whose proportion of working age population is 68% and 68.8% respectively. Goa and Kerala too had working age people constituting as much as 72% and 69.2% of their population.

Those above 60 years constitute about 9% of the population, about 108 million people. Again, the variation is wide with just 7.8% and 8.5% of the population in Bihar and UP being over 60 years while the share of elderly in the population is 12.7% in Kerala.