Portraits of Population

The Indian government’s digital census library houses nearly 8,000 documents. Unless you are deeply interested in the subject, these records are precisely what you would expect from Indian bureaucracy. They consist of dry appendixes, endless tables, and granular reports devoid of any narrative element. Officials themselves acknowledged this reality, noting that while the census is a “mine of information,” it remains a “distant, uninteresting, even intimidating, corpus” for the common reader.

For example, here is a quick scroll through nearly 900 pages of the ‘1961 Census General Report’. Apart from the handful of maps that appear in the first few pages, the document is quite tedious to go through.

This is a fairly representative sample of what these documents can look like, which is primarily because the intended audience are usually the administration itself, scientists, researchers, economists and other specialists. For this group, the various series of Census documents are a utility and starting points for further analysis.

The 1971 and 1981 Censuses, however, produced something new alongside the usual volumes. Using a more narrative writing style coupled with charts, maps, illustrations, and photographs, the government translated its own data into an entirely different format through the A Portrait of Population series, one that was not made for specialists and researchers but for everyday readers.

This move toward telling stories about population and demographics didn't happen by itself, and before we look at the documents themselves, we should consider what changed to make this seem necessary. Why would a government that is constantly overworked choose to take time out to create work for people for whom the census isn't 'intended'? First, let's look at what was going on in the world at the time to find an answer.

The Population Bomb book cover alongside a page from The Limits to Growth showing a world urban population chart — *The Population Bomb* (1968) by Paul R. Ehrlich, and a World Urban Population chart from *The Limits to Growth* (1972)

In the 1960s and 1970s, conversations surrounding population growth, resource depletion, and family planning took on a newfound urgency worldwide. In 1968, the publication of the bestselling book The Population Bomb by American biologist Paul Ehrlich sparked a global anxiety regarding unchecked population growth, warning of mass starvation and societal upheaval. A report published a few years later called The Limits to Growth used "futuristic computer modelling" to show that unchecked population and economic growth would destroy the world's economic and ecological systems. These conversations in intellectual circles found their way into international development policy. The World Bank and the United Nations began to promote this global awareness actively, dedicating significant institutional resources to 'population education'. The UN would even go on to declare 1974 as the 'World Population Year', and therefore among member countries, this was the defining agenda of the times.

The consequences of this agenda played out very differently depending on where you were. In China, control measures would eventually lead to the brutally enforced one-child policy. In India, the 1970s saw the government push mass forced-sterilization programs. People had to get sterilized to get , electricity, and their children could be denied schooling if they hadn't. In 1975, more than eight million men and women in India were sterilized, which is a dark time in the history of this issue.

Still from a documentary film on population growth — A still from Chaos (1969), a Films Division of India animated short on unchecked population growth.

A softer (and saner?) voice was used in the same campaign through public awareness campaigns, educational films, and slogans about family planning. The youth, it was thought, must also be educated about population growth at a foundational level, before they became the population problem themselves.

Several parts of the government worked together to make this happen. In 1966, the urged college teachers to involve themselves in Family Planning programmes. In 1969, the Ministry of Education and MoHFP organized the first national seminar on population education, with the objective of defining a plan of action for curriculum at different stages of schooling. One of its recommendations was that the establish a 'Population Education Cell' to formulate appropriate curriculum at various levels.

Snippet of recommendations from Population Education, NCERT, 1969

Giving students a fundamental understanding of demographic concepts such as birth rate, life expectancy, and sex ratio, as well as acquainting them with data visualization concepts, were among the areas identified.

Y.B. Chavan inaugurating a Census Conference of Superintendents at Vigyan Bhawan, Delhi, 1969 — Y.B. Chavan at the Census Conference, Vigyan Bhawan, 1969 (Source: ORGI)

It was also in 1969 that addressed the Census Conference in August 1969, speaking to the superintendents and officials preparing for the upcoming 1971 Census. Towards the end of his speech, he set down his expectations for those who were in the room: how might census data be made interesting and educational to the common man? How might it be made attractive enough to read?

That answer appears to have included the Portrait of Population publications, which were introduced by Mr. A. Chandra Sekhar, the Census Commissioner for the 1971 Census. The series’ purpose, as we know now, was to simplify demographic data so that anyone could understand it. The authors were aware of both the ambition and the difficulty of the task, acknowledging that this was challenging to do. Mostly because, well, how interesting can you make the census for an average person?

Despite this admission, the text in these documents is clear, easy to understand and as interesting as a census document can possibly read. Each booklet is written at the state level and between each other share a common structure, framed by titles such as ‘How Many Are We?’ or ‘The Religions We Follow’ and explain terms like what a village or a is, how sex ratios are calculated, and what a means. They also always do so from the perspective of that particular state, which localizes the learning in the reader’s familiar environment.

Each state also had its own artists, , and cartographers, who brought their own distinct styles to the same subject. The range is wide, from fairly minimal line charts to pictograms to entirely non-standard illustrations visualizing the same underlying data. Some of the most striking examples are of dependency ratios, where artists quite literally depicted dependents being carried by other demographics.

The Same Data,
Drawn Differently

A selection of graphics from the series, grouped by topic,
with definitions from the documents

DEPENDENCY RATIO

The dependency ratio of a population closely reflects its age distribution. In developing countries, economic development is directly linked to age composition, since every member of society is a consumer, but only some are producers...

ARE THE MEN AND WOMEN BALANCED?

In the Indian census the sex ratio is defined as the number of females per 1,000 males. In many of the countries of the world the sex ratio is expressed as the number of males per hundred females. We will be adopting the Indian concept...

THE RELIGIONS WE FOLLOW

Ours is a land of many faiths, yet we all live in harmony. Religion, considered a basic cultural characteristic of our population, is recorded in the census in 1971, it appeared as the tenth question on the individual slip. Enumerators were instructed to record those with no religion accordingly, and to not confuse religion with caste...

HOW MANY OF US CAN READ?

A literate is a person who can both read and write with understanding in any language, without necessarily having formal education. Children up to age four were treated as illiterate regardless of ability. Those who could only read or could only sign their name were not considered literate.

POPULATION GROWTH

The natural increase of a population is the annual difference between the number of births and deaths in a specific area. The rate at which that population expands over a given period is known as the growth rate.

DEPENDENCY RATIO

ARE THE MEN AND WOMEN BALANCED?

THE RELIGIONS WE FOLLOW

HOW MANY OF US CAN READ?

POPULATION GROWTH

The books introduce topics within each state in their own unique way, with a mix of facts and some personal takes on local myths and culture. For instance, Mizoram touches on tribal spirits and traditional farming, while the Mysore booklet highlights local crafts like silver work from Bidar and traditional saris, and Himachal Pradesh contrasts the snowy views loved by tourists with the tough reality locals face just to make a living through difficult farming. These accounts should be read with a slightly critical eye, as the authors will naturally emphasize certain perspectives over others, particularly on subjects like religion. Nevertheless, these descriptions provided a useful tool for someone living in some state to learn about and discuss regions of the country that they had never even been to.

We've put all the Portrait of Population booklets on the Internet Archive. Browse them in full on Archive.org full, or keep reading to explore the graphics we've extracted from them.

Comparison of individual Indian states to other countries as a way of emphasizing the scale of numbers is a recurring pattern. For example, The Portrait of Population: describes how India supports 15% of the world’s population on only 2.4% of the land, with a graphic above it noting that every 7th person in the world is an Indian.

It is also noted that though Goa and Daman & Diu are ‘rather insignificant’ compared to other states, their collective population still larger than Luxembourg, or the Republic of Congo. There are often remarks at the end of these comparisons to emphasize once again that India’s population is growing at an alarming rate and it is important to understand so.

States and their visuals

The count of illustrations, charts, and maps used in that state's Portrait of Population booklet (1971 and 1981)

State boundaries as of 1972

Half a century later, what makes these documents worth looking at is the tremendous and earnest effort being made to render this data interesting and engaging. This was before data visualization became cheaper to produce digitally, which means every chart, every pictogram, and every illustrated comparison was an expensive decision in terms of time and effort, especially within the already stretched departments of the government. One can imagine the writers, artists, and designers (because that is what they were, even if the bureaucracy had not used those words) who produced these documents thinking about what would land with a reader holding this pamphlet.

When the 1991 census arrived, the approach to map-making and data visualization had begun the shift toward automation. The government recognized that the “traditional way of mapping requires much time for processing of paper originals” and sought to “modernize” its approach.

In December 1991, the Office of the hosted a workshop on ‘Census Cartography’ specifically to train researchers and cartographers from various states in ‘Digital Mapping’ and computer-assisted design. Using new tools and GIS software, the goal was to “enhance data dissemination through computer graphics at a much faster speed”. While these workshops focused explicitly on maps, it is easy to see how this overarching push for digital efficiency would have entered into all forms of data visualization. It is reasonable to assume that as officials were trained to use the same software tools, the styles and tastes of individual draughtsmen gave way to the defaults of shared programs.

And so what might have begun as an effort in state messaging, originating in the global population panic of the 1970s, has left us with a beautiful and unrepeatable collection of Indian graphical aesthetics from that era, before we had started to move closer and closer to standardized outputs.

We have extracted, categorized, and made nearly 700 visualizations from these documents searchable. You can search, filter, explore and click each image to know more, as well as open to that graphic directly within the census document in our collection on the Internet Archive. We’ll continue to add to the archive as we discover more, and there are undoubtedly more. Start by clicking ‘How to use the archive’ to know more, or just explore it yourself below!

An Archive of

Portraits

Population

Layout

Filter by State

729 figures shown

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A Diagram Chasing Production

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Methodology

Source documents were acquired from the website of the Office of the Registrar General, India. We used Python’s LayoutParser to extract tables and figures from the PDF files and run basic OCR. Gemini Flash categorized these visualizations by identifying bar charts, choropleth maps, pie charts, and more, along with generated descriptive titles for the light box gallery views. This process created a collection of around 1,700 valid images. To ensure everything was accurate, we manually reviewed the entire dataset and reclassify, rotate, crop, and re-tag individual images as needed.

The website is built with SvelteKit and Shadcn-Svelte. For the “similarity” view, a Python script analyses the visual features of the images and uses a t-SNE algorithm to cluster similar images together. We use Raster Fairy by Mario Klingemann to force these organic clusters into a structured grid. The “state” view relies on a custom script that uses an Indian states GeoJSON (sourced from IndiaViz) to organize the images geographically. It generates a cluster of grid squares for each state based on how many images are in it, automatically nudging the clusters apart to prevent overlaps while maintaining the rough shape of India’s map. PixiJS is used to finally render the interactive explorer.

AI Declaration

No text (apart from the taxonomy for charts, their titles and tags) in this story was ‘generated’ or written by AI. The authors wrote and rewrote words, and used LanguageTool only for grammar and spellchecks. The artwork was created using the classical technique of thinking about things and subsequently illustrating them by moving one’s hands.

The author did use Claude for coding assistance, meaning internal logic, layout algorithms, and scripting may have been partially LLM-generated.