censusindia

censusindia is an R package from Saket Lab at IIT Bombay that puts a century of the Census of India into a single function call. It covers every census from 1901 to 2011 at the state and district level, and subdistricts where the data allows.

The data includes:

• Population counts and the Primary Census Abstract: population, literacy, workers and sex ratio.
• SC and ST tables: the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe populations and how they are distributed.
• Mother tongue tables: speakers of each language by district for 2011, along with a ready-made measure of each district’s linguistic diversity.
• Population projections: MoHFW projections from 2011 to 2036 by state and district.

Any table can be joined to district boundaries for its census year with attach_geometry(), and plot_map() and compare_maps() draw choropleths directly. Search functions such as search_census_variables("literacy") help you find the right column without digging through census codebooks. The package site includes worked articles on sex ratio, tribal isolation, social composition and population change.

It installs with pak::pak("saketlab/censusindia").