Basic Characteristic of East India’s Villages

The 2011 Census data released by Office of Registrar General of India just recently has been further analyzed in order to get characteristic of Indian Village, particularly of Eastern part of India which comprise of its states namely, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Assam, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya.  There are about two hundred sixty eight thousand villages in East India and these house over 324 million people i.e. the average size or occupants per village  comes out to be about 1208. The other characteristics are:

Ø  The villages with population of less than 200 are forty two thousand (15.6% of total number) and the average population is only 104 and these house about 1.3 percent of its total rural population. 

Ø  The villages with population between 200 and 500 are about 60 thousand (22% of total number) and the average population is only 344 and these house over six percent of its total rural population.

Ø   The villages with population between 500 and 1000 are about 67 thousand (25% of total number) and the average population is only 723 and these house about fifteen percent of its total rural population.

Ø   The villages with population between 1000 and 2000 are about 57 thousand (21% of total number) and the average population is only 1407 and these house about twenty five percent of total rural population.

Ø  The villages with population between 2000 and 5000 are about 34 thousand as well (13% of total number) and the average population is only 2976 and these house about thirty one and a half percent of total rural population.

Ø  The villages with population between 5000 and 10000 are about 6.5 thousand (2% of total number) and the average population is only 6648 and these house about thirteen percent of total rural population.

Ø  The villages with population over 10000 are only 1671 (0.6% of total number) and the average population is 14892 and these house about 7.7 percent of total rural population. The bigger villages lie mostly in Bihar.

Eastern India is having variety of villages both small and big.  The following table gives state wise averages of smallest class of up to 200 populations, of biggest class of over 10000 populations and overall average size are as below:

STATE	Average for Below 200 Population Class	Average for Above 10000 Population Class	Average Size of Villages
BIHAR	103	15075	2363
SIKKIM	60	0	1075
ARUNACHAL PRADESH	83	0	203
NAGALAND	127	11116	1005
MANIPUR	124	12028	730
MIZORAM	123	0	746
TRIPURA	125	13236	3143
MEGHALAYA	115	0	367
ASSAM	108	16707	1057
WEST BENGAL	107	14778	1659
JHARKHAND	105	13883	850
ODISHA	102	12740	733
CHHATTISGARH	115	11520	1002
MADHYA PRADESH	101	12321	1012
EASTERN INDIA	104	14892	1208