1991 census of India

The population of India was counted as 838,583,988.^[2] The number of enumerators was 1.6 million.^[1]

Hindus comprises 69.01 crore(81.53%) and Muslims were 5.67 crore(12.61%) in 1991 census.^[3]

Population trends for major religious groups in India (1991)
Religious group	Population %
Hindu	81.53%
Muslim	12.61%
Christian	2.32%
Sikh	1.94%
Buddhist	0.77%
Jain	0.40%
Parsi	0.08%
Animist, others	0.44%

The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues". According to the 1991 census, 22 languages had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114 had more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).^[4] The number of Sanskrit speakers in India in 1991 census was 49,736.^[5]

Census towns in 1991 census of India were 1,702.^[6]
Jammu and Kashmir was excluded from census-taking in 1991 due to Insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir.^[7] The number for J&K was derived by interpolation for the population of religious communities in the state.^[8]
Census was not conducted in Assam in the previous census in 1981 due to separatist movements that time. The census data for Assam was done based on interpolation.^[9]

^ ^a ^b Vijayanunni, M. (26–29 August 1998). "Planning for the 2001 Census of India based on the 1991 Census" (PDF). 18th Population Census Conference. Honolulu, Hawaii, US: Association of National Census and Statistics Directors of America, Asia, and the Pacific. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 November 2008. Retrieved 17 December 2014.

^ Dev, Amiya (2010). "Literary Multilingualism II : Multilingualism in India". In Lisa Block de Behar; Paola Mildonian; Jean-Michel Djian; Djlel Kadir; Alfons Knauth; Dolores Romero Lopez; Marcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva (eds.). Comparative Literature : Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity (PDF). Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Vol. 2. pp. 172–183. Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, EOLSS Publishers, Paris, France, [1]. Retrieved 17 December 2014.

^ "With current trends, it will take 220 years for India's Hindu population to equal Muslims numbers in the world". 16 December 2014.

^ Mallikarjun, B. (7 November 2001). "Languages of India according to 2001 Census". Languages in India. Retrieved 17 December 2014.

^ "Where are the Sanskrit speakers?". The Hindu. 9 August 2014.

^ "Census findings point to decade of rural distress". The Hindu. 25 September 2011.

^ Sugden, Joanna; Seervai, Shanoor (9 January 2015). "Where Are India's 2011 Census Figures on Religion?". Wall Street Journal.

^ "Religion Census: A faithful count".

^ "Muslims' growth rate much lower". The Times of India. 7 September 2004.