Data Bytes

Historically, the largest share of the Indian household food budget went to cereals - chiefly wheat in north India and rice in south India - and pulses.

In the late 1980s, over 40% of the average food spending of Indians was on cereals and pulses alone. As households got richer, their overall food budgets grew, and they were able to better diversify their food expenditure, spending more on meats, fruits and vegetables and dairy products. As a result, the share of their household spending that went to cereals declined over time.

Simultaneously, there was a significant expansion in state provisioning of free or subsidised cereals from the early 2000s onwards, meaning that fewer households had to pay for the cereals that they were consuming. Taken together, spending on cereals declined.

With family purse strings loosening up a little, households have chosen to spend more on processed foods including packaged food, non-alcoholic beverages and purchased cooked meals.

Since the late 1980s, the share of the food budget that goes to processed food has more than tripled, and is now higher than the amount spent on cereals. Processed foods now make up the single largest category of food-related spending in India. 10% of the entire budget of Indian households - including food, rent, fuel, education and other expenses - goes towards processed foods alone.

This change isn't restricted to richer households alone - India's poorest and richest households spend the same share of their food budgets on fried foods, for instance.

Read more on what Indian households spend on as they get richer.

As Indians increasingly encounter information online, verifying it is becoming increasingly challenging. Younger Indians are more likely to have the skills needed, but across all ages, these abilities are in short supply.

In 2023, the National Statistics Office's Comprehensive Annual Modular Survey (CAMS) asked respondents who could use a smartphone or computer about their Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, including their ability to carry out different tasks to verify information they come across online. These included checking whether they knew how to verify whether information circulated on social media was authentic, the ability to determine when content was published and the ability to establish the authenticity of a web address.

These skills were most common among people in their 20s. Even in this age group, however, only about three in ten men and two in ten women who could use a smartphone or computer were able to demonstrate these skills. The share falls sharply with age, with women consistently less likely than men to have these skills. Across the population, only one in five Indians who can use a smartphone or computer were able to verify online information.

The ability to verify information is increasingly important as more people get news, information and services online. Limited digital skills can make people more vulnerable to online fraud and scams, and misinformation. Older people and women are less likely to have the skills to identify false or misleading information, making them particularly vulnerable.

Read more about the ability of Indians to perform basic ICT skills.

Fewer women than men being in the labour force is a global phenomenon, but the gender gap is one of the highest in India. While 80% of men are part of the labour force, only 40% of women are in the labour force in the country.

Both men and women may enter, leave, and re-enter the labour force for a range of reasons. However, the circumstances that take men and women out of the labour force are very different.

India's national labour surveys ask people who are currently not working but have worked in the past the reason for dropping out of work. Most men between the ages of 20-49 years cite health as the reason, followed by lay-offs or contract termination.

Health reasons take some women out of work as well, but the numbers are much smaller, and restricted to older women. Women in their twenties, thirties and forties who have dropped out of the labour force largely cite household work and childcare as the reasons they left the workforce.

Childcare is a particularly important reason cited by young women, or those in their twenties. More than three in ten women between the ages of 20-29 years who were earlier working report childcare as the reason they do not work anymore.

As women grow older, household work and health become more prominent reasons to quit work. Across all age groups in the prime working ages, however, household work remains the leading reason women leave the labour force.

Read more about which Indian women are most likely to be in the labour force.

About one in four Indians over the age of 15 reported smoking or using some form of tobacco as of 2021, according to the National Family Health Survey 2019-21. However, there is a significant divide in tobacco consumption between younger and older adults.

Across the population, over one in three Indians in their 40s and 50s consume tobacco, compared to just half that share among those in their 20s. The gap is particularly striking among men. Over half of Indian men in their 30s and 40s consume tobacco, whereas the share is just over a quarter among men in their 20s.

Tobacco consumption is much less common among women. Overall, just 4% of women consume tobacco in some form. However, even among women, prevalence increases with age, reaching about 17% among women aged 50 and above.

Tobacco is consumed in many forms, the most common being paan masala or gutkha, followed by cigarettes, khaini and bidis. Across age groups, chewing tobacco like gutkha, paan masala and khaini is more common than smoking. About two-thirds of tobacco users consume these products, while around half smoke bidis or cigarettes. Regardless of the form, tobacco has serious health consequences and is a major risk factor for serious non-communicable diseases, like cancers, heart disease and respiratory illnesses.

This generational gap is observed globally. Across most countries, younger people are less likely to use tobacco than their older counterparts.

Read more about what's changing in tobacco usage in India.

While the majority of India's rain falls during its south-west monsoon, the pre-monsoon season (March-May) also accounts for a share of the precipitation. The 2025 pre-monsoon season in India stands out as one of the most extreme on record.

Three key rainfall indicators-total precipitation, maximum one-day rainfall, and maximum five-day rainfall-capture the severity of short-duration rainfall events. Total precipitation is the cumulative rainfall received during the pre-monsoon season. Maximum one-day rainfall represents the highest rainfall recorded in a single day during the season. Maximum five-day rainfall measures the highest rainfall accumulated over any consecutive five-day period.

In 2025, the maximum one-day and maximum five-day rainfall both recorded their highest values since 1951. Together with the near-record total seasonal precipitation, these indicators suggest that pre-monsoon rainfall is becoming both heavier and more concentrated during heavy spells. All three indicators show an upward trajectory over the past seven decades, with the sharpest increases occurring after 2015.

Historically, the pre-monsoon was relatively drier, averaging just 10-15 rainy days and 20-50 mm of cumulative rain at the national level. Recently, however, both rainfall frequency and totals have increased, with 2025 recording seasonal precipitation of 126 mm - the second-highest value since 1951.

The increasing concentration of rainfall into one-day and multi-day events has important implications for disaster risk, agriculture and urban infrastructure.

Read about the seasons in India that have got wetter and drier.

Jobs in the public sector remain among the most sought after in India. The public sector is made up of various departments and arms of the government, including companies run directly by the government. Jobs in the public sector are more secure with greater employment benefits than in the private sector.

Yet the public sector can only offer a minority of Indian adults jobs. Just 6% of workers in India are in the public sector. Another 6% of workers are in private companies. The majority of India's workers, meanwhile, are employed in household enterprises.

This data comes from the 2023-24 round of India's annual Periodic Labour Force Survey, a nationally representative labour survey conducted by the National Statistics Office.

The share of the workforce in government jobs is highest in India's north-east, where the private sector remains small. One in four jobs in Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim are in the public sector. The share of public sector jobs is also high In India's richer and better educated southern states, including Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where between 10% and 15% of the workforce is in the public sector.

The share of the workforce in public sector jobs is lowest in India's poorest regions with the lowest levels of education, including large parts of central and northern India. Only 3% of workers in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are in government jobs, while more than 90% of the workforce there works in household enterprises.

Read more about the size of India's formal sector.

India's richest households are nearly twice as likely to eat fruit every week as those who live in its poorest households. In contrast, rich and poor households are equally likely to eat fried foods.

The National Family Health Survey asks respondents a series of questions on how often they consume specific food items. Respondents are asked whether they eat items such as fruits, fried foods, milk and vegetables daily, weekly, occasionally, or not at all. The survey also measures household wealth using an index based on assets and housing conditions. Households are then ranked and divided into five equal groups or quintiles.

Those in poorer households eat fried food more frequently than fruits. According to the National Institute of Nutrition, unhealthy, highly processed, high-fat, sugar and salt foods have become more affordable and accessible than the healthier alternatives like fruits. Low fruit intake can lead to deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals, which can affect immunity and overall health. At the same time, frequent consumption of fried food is associated with higher risks of obesity, heart disease and other non-communicable diseases. Together, these trends suggest that poorer households may be more exposed to both under-nutrition and diet-related health issues.

There are also differences across regions and gender. Urban populations tend to consume fruits more frequently than rural populations, although fried food consumption remains common in both. Women generally report slightly lower consumption of both fruits and fried foods compared to men.

Read more about the food habits of Indians.

Institutional births refer to deliveries that take place in a health facility, whether public or private. As of 2021, nearly nine in ten births in India were institutional.

Among the larger states, Tamil Nadu and Kerala reported the highest levels of institutional births. At the other end, more than one in five deliveries still took place at home in five of India's states - Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya and Nagaland - as of 2021.

Ensuring that women give birth in a health facility is one of the most effective ways to reduce both maternal and infant deaths. Childbirth can involve complications that require timely medical care, making access to skilled health personnel and emergency obstetric services critical.

India has made significant progress in improving the number of institutional deliveries in the last three decades. In 1993, only about 25% of births took place in a public or private health facility. By 2021, this increased to nearly 90% of deliveries, and much of this progress came from rural areas.

Some states in particular have seen rapid progress. In Rajasthan and Odisha, for instance, only about one in ten births took place in a health facility in the early 1990s. By 2021, this had increased to more than nine in ten births.

Public health facilities account for most institutional deliveries in India, particularly in rural areas. Yet access remains uneven. Among the poorest rural households, more than 25% of births still occur at home.

Read more about the determinants of maternal mortality in India.

The incarceration rate - the number of people in prisons for every 100,000 persons - is an important measure of a country's socio-economic environment, and criminal and justice systems. India's incarceration rate of around 40 persons in jail for every 100,000 residents is one of the lowest in the world. However national averages hide high incarceration rates among some groups in particular.

The incarceration rate for men, and for young men in particular, is much higher. The incarceration rate for men aged 18-30 years is over three times the national average. It is also significantly higher in some states in particular.

Punjab has India's highest incarceration rate, led to a large extent by charges under anti-narcotics laws. Young men in the 18-30 age group in Punjab and Delhi are ten times more likely to be in prison than an average person in the country.

With an incarceration rate of over 400, over one in every 250 young men in these two states is in prison. For context, the United States of America, which has among the highest incarceration rates in the world, had 520 people in prison for every 100,000 residents in 2023.

A large number of those in prison are undertrials. 85% of the incarcerated young men in Punjab's jails and 96% in Delhi's jails were undertrials, meaning that they were awaiting completion of their trial and had yet to be convicted of an offence.

Read more about incarceration rates across the country.

Warming in India is not occurring uniformly. While both daytime and night-time temperatures have risen over the past seven decades, minimum temperatures have increased faster than maximum temperatures, indicating that nights are warming more rapidly than days.

An anomaly is the departure of a given year's temperature from the long-term average over a reference period. The current baseline in use in India is the average of the 1990-2020 period.

During the 1950s up to the 1980s, both maximum and minimum temperatures fluctuated around the baseline, with some years warmer and some cooler.

In recent years, however, the data shows not just sustained warming, but a sharp acceleration, particularly in minimum temperatures.

Since 2020, the pace has increased markedly. The minimum anomaly rose from +0.43°C in 2023 to approximately +0.90°C in 2024 - the highest recorded value in the entire series. The maximum anomaly reached +0.40°C over the same period, showing the faster pace of increase in the minimum temperature anomaly.

Together, the persistence of positive anomalies and the faster increase in minimum temperatures point to a warming climate in which heat is becoming both more intense during the day and more sustained through the night. This asymmetry limits overnight recovery, raising health risks, affecting agriculture, increasing energy demand and intensifying heat stress on vulnerable populations.

Read more about the pace of warming in India.

Internet usage in India is heavily concentrated among younger people. Of the 60% of Indians who had used the internet as of 2025, most are in their teens and twenties.

Internet usage among people in their thirties and forties, on the other hand, is much lower. Fewer than half of people in their 50s, and fewer than a quarter of people over the age of 60 use the internet. In contrast, nearly all Indians in their late teens and in their twenties use the internet.

This data comes from the Comprehensive Modular Survey - Telecom, a nationally representative survey conducted by India's National Statistics Office. The survey asked people who reported they had used a phone or a computer whether they were able to use the internet, and whether they had used the internet at least once in the three months preceding the survey.

A substantial number of children have also used the internet. More than half of children between five and nine years of age (54%) reported having used the internet at least once in the three months preceding the survey. Children between five and nine years of age are more likely to have used the internet than people in their fifties.

Access to the internet increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among children and teenagers, likely as a result of lockdowns and online schooling.

Read more about who in India doesn't yet use phones or the internet.

The share of manufacturing in India's gross domestic product is declining, both at the national level, and within most key states, except Gujarat.

Three sectors together make up the domestic product of a state or a country - agriculture, manufacturing and services. From being an agriculture-led country, India's workforce has steadily moved away from farming. While agriculture still contributes a large share of the economy of the less developed states, manufacturing and services began to drive growth in the more developed states since the 2000s.

However, the growth of manufacturing appears to have stagnated or declined in India, and in most of these states. Manufacturing contributed more than 16% of India's GDP in the 2000s and early 2010s, but by 2024, it contributed less than 13% of value added to India's gross domestic product.

Within India, manufacturing is dispersed across the country, but is concentrated among a few large states, where its contribution to the economy is higher than the national average. These states are known as India's industrialised states, and include Karnataka, Maharashtra, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.

In the early 2010s, manufacturing accounted for 18-24% of the GDP of these five states. By 2024, it had fallen to 13-18% in four of the five states. The share of services grew faster in these states during this period.

Gujarat is the only standout, with the share of manufacturing in its GDP having steadily increased, and is now at 35%.

Read more about the economies of Indian states.

One in six Indian workers is a salaried or a regular wage worker. Labour statistics define salaried or regular wage employment as the working arrangement in which employees who work in enterprises owned by others are paid their wages on a regular basis, generally from the same employer.

The wages of salaried workers between 25 and 50 years of age gradually increase with each new year of completed formal education. Here, formal education begins in Grade 1, and a child completes one year in formal education when she successfully clears the first grade.

But this increase in wages comes in distinct stages. For workers with zero to seven or eight years in formal education, there is little change in earnings. This means that completing the primary level of education does not raise income levels.

The first significant increase in wages is seen for workers who spent 11 or 12 years in education, equivalent to completion of high school. Beyond that, wages continue to gradually rise for workers with every additional year of completed education, meaning that they are enrolled in a higher education programme.

The largest increase in wages, however, is for workers with 16 or more years of education. This is equivalent to the completion of a four-year undergraduate programme. Salaried workers with a higher education earn twice that of those with secondary education, and thrice that of those with only primary education.

Read more about the kinds of jobs that India's salaried workers do.

In 1950, a child born in India could expect to live only until the age of 41, while a child born in the United Kingdom the same year could expect to live to 69 years.

Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years a newborn would live if they were exposed to the sex- and age-specific death rates prevailing at that time. This is a hypothetical measure that assumes current mortality rates will remain constant throughout the individual's life, providing a snapshot of a population's overall health and mortality conditions at that time. Data on life expectancy for the countries of the world is periodically estimated by the United Nations Population Division.

In 1950, India was one of the world's poorest and least developed countries. By 2024, not only had life expectancy in India gone up to 72 years, but the gap between India and the UK had also narrowed substantially, to now being less than a decade apart.

The only recent time that life expectancy in India slid backwards was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when life expectancy fell in most countries, reflecting the prevailing health conditions at the time. By 2022, life expectancy was back to its pre-pandemic levels, and on the path to growth, once again.

Read more about why life expectancy is different at different age groups.

The majority of tobacco use in India is of chewing tobacco products such as paan masala, gutkha, or khaini. Gutkha is pre-mixed paan masala with tobacco. Paan masala is also sold separately and mixed with tobacco later to be consumed.

Since most tobacco consumption in India is by men, we look at the type of tobacco usage by men. About 40% of men aged 15-49 use tobacco in some form, compared to just 5% of women, according to the National Family Health Survey, 2021.

Tobacco use in India as measured by the NFHS includes smoking cigarettes or bidis, as well as chewing tobacco products such as khaini (tobacco leaves mixed with slaked lime), paan masala, gutkha, and other similar preparations. Since respondents may use tobacco in more than one form, the NFHS does not measure consumption of these products as discrete categories.

More than a quarter of men chew tobacco products, while under one in five men smoke bidis or cigarettes. Tobacco usage is higher in rural areas, and the form of usage also differs, with cigarette smoking more prevalent among urban men.

Both forms of tobacco have major health impacts, including life threatening conditions like cancer of the oral cavity, oesophagus and liver, as well as heart diseases and respiratory illnesses.

Read more about the most common diseases in India.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines intentional homicide as "unlawful death inflicted upon a person with the intent to cause death or serious injury". In India, the UNODC includes the crimes of murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and dowry death based on the reports of India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), as intentional homicide. The total number of victims of intentional homicide has reduced since 1990 according to this data.

In 1992, the number of intentional homicides in India reached its peak with nearly 50,000 victims, and has since been on the decline. By 2022, this number had come down to 40,000.

Since 1999, when gender disaggregated numbers were first made available, the number of male victims of intentional homicide has reduced by nearly a third, from 33,000 to 24,000 in 2023.

On the other hand, the number of women victims has not declined in a similar way. From 14,000 deaths in 1999, the number of female victims of intentional homicide climbed to 19,000 in 2011 before declining to 16,000 in 2022, a number still substantially higher than it was in 1999. Of the 16,000 deaths, 6500 deaths are dowry deaths.

This suggests that the decline in homicides and homicide rates in India has largely been driven by a decline in homicide rates among male victims only, and not for female victims.

Read about the reported causes of intentional homicides in India.