The 2001 census was the fourteenth in India, with the first enumeration having taken place in 1871 when the population count was 211 million. In the latest census, two million enumerators visited 650,000 villages, 5,500 towns and scores of cities. This huge exercise drew many accusations of fraud and political manipulation. For example, the Muslim League claim that Muslims have been undercounted in Bombay and other areas as part of a conspiracy to conceal the real strength of the Muslim community in the country. Syed Shahbuddin, a former MP and editor of Muslim Monthly, said: 'Politics in India has always revolved around numbers, and by undercounting the Muslims in a certain part of India you distort reality and thus you affect the welfare and development programs in the country.'
The final census figure for March 2001 was 1,028,610,328 of which 532,156,772 were males and 496,453,556 were females. This gave a ratio of 933 females per 1,000 males. The total number of households was 193,579,954 with an average number of people per household of 5.3. India supports 16.7 per cent of the world's population on approximately 2.4 per cent of the global land area. India has more people than all of Africa and also more than North America and South America together. Its population density has increased steadily from 77 per km2 in 1901 to 216 per km2 in 1981, 267 per km2 in 1991 and 324 per km2 in 2001 (Figure 1).