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Synopsis For the lay reader, the Census is a drab subject, replete with massive statistics. However, India has proud history of conducting an uninterrupted decennial census ever since 1881. With the increasing entry of professional demographers in the census arena and the unfortunate development of equating demography with family planning census analysis tends to get overshadowed by demographers. The present volume, which is mainly based on the results of 2001 Census, covers wide spectrum of themes relating to the census. This also was a very provocative to us for bringing out book so hastily lies in our inability to cope with requests for exclusive interviews and popular articles for the press, commenting on the first results of the 2001 Census which have just been released by the Census Commissioner. We therefore, thought of putting together a simplified set of key tables from census provisional results, along with a series of articles. The significance of census data for the successful management of India’s pluralistic and demographic polity has been increasingly realized. The census, far from being numerical exercise in mere head count, has emerged as a social document.