Yet since the last big Himalayan quake, in 1950, India's population has trebled and urbanised.
That's no political wonder--65% to 70% of India's population is dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood.
But with a tenth of India's population, Bihar attracts a hundredth of its private investment.
After all, more than half of India's population is now under 25, much of it rapidly urbanizing.
Government data show that a third of children from the wealthiest fifth of India's population are malnourished.
For example, nearly a third of India's population is vegetarian, so it's easy to find meatless dishes there.
Using biometric methods, including an iris scan, the scheme is logging details of India's population on a central database.
However, developing countries like India have a population in excess of 1 billion.
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These days Gujarat accounts for 5% of India's population but 16% of its industrial output and 22% of its exports.
The south, encompassing the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, comprises a little over a fourth of India's population.
Sikhs make up around 2% of India's population of 1.2 billion.
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More than 60% of India's population directly depend on agriculture.
Half of India's population is in the reproductive age group.
It was also looking to get lawmakers' approval for a program that would ensure cheap food grains to two-thirds of India's population and provide a major campaigning plank for the general election.
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The four northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh will alone account for 44% of the expected addition of 370 million people to India's population between 2001-26, the report says.
According to the 2001 census, India's population was growing at a rate of around 2% a year in the previous decade, a marked decline on earlier decades but still adding 181m people, more than the total population of Brazil.
The population of India will reach 2 billion before the end of this century.
India, with a population of 1 billion, not far off China's 1.3 billion, has fewer than 40m wireless subscribers.
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Indiscriminate hunting over the centuries has decimated India's tiger population from an estimated 40, 000 animals 100 ago to about 1, 700 today.
In 1700 the world's biggest economy (and leading cotton producer) was India, with a population of 165m, followed by China, with 138m.
India's large population means that even a small increase in coffee consumption by individuals can affect global supply and demand for the commodity.
Which accounts for, erm, almost everyone in China, a sizeable proportion of the population of India, and everyone in Spanish-speaking and Russian-speaking countries.
Pardhi poachers, for example, are one of the biggest threats to India's dwindling population of tigers, which they have eradicated from several national parks.
The fact that India has a large population and a growing pool of skilled professionals tells us nothing about whether individual visa cases are decided properly.
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Lacking such a patent until now, Indian drug firms, for instance, specialised in making copycat drugs and selling them cheaply to India's huge population and beyond.
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With the population in India increasingly migrant in nature, this payment infrastructure will enable a large populace to participate in the financial sector, opening new opportunities for growth.
Analysts say for foreign airlines such as AirAsia and Etihad, the attraction of India is its huge population--the second-largest in the world--and the growing number of Indians living abroad.
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