What the national table records
The final C-01 national row contains 1,210,854,977 people. It records 966,257,353 as Hindu and 172,245,158 as Muslim. The official release presents those shares as 79.8% and 14.2%. Smaller communities remain visible in the complete table: Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain, together with Other religions and persuasions and Religion not stated.
Keeping all eight categories matters. Religion not stated is a separate census response category. It should not be renamed atheist, no religion, or other religion. Similarly, the combined Other religions and persuasions category should retain its official label instead of being treated as one uniform community. The sum of all eight counts, rather than a selection of the largest categories, is the national total.
Evidence: Census 2011 C-01: Population by religious community, India
A state share and a national share answer different questions
A community count tells you how many people were recorded in that place. Its share of the state tells you how that community fits within the state population. A third calculation—the state’s share of that community across India—answers where members of the community were distributed nationally. These denominators are different and should never share an unlabeled percentage column.
For this page, a state community percentage is calculated as the community count divided by that state’s total population. It is rounded to two decimal places. The national headline percentages use the official release’s one-decimal presentation. Small differences in displayed precision are therefore expected, and rounded shares need not add to exactly 100.00%.
Evidence: Census 2011 C-01: Population by religious community, India
Read the map as it existed in 2011
The source has 35 states and union territories. Andhra Pradesh includes the area that later became Telangana. The former Jammu and Kashmir includes the area now in Ladakh. Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu are separate entries. A comparison with today’s 36 administrative units needs an explicit boundary reconciliation; renaming an old row would not perform that reconciliation.
The national workbook also provides rural and urban rows. Those describe the Census 2011 classification of settlements, not the current extent of cities. A historical urban share can be useful for studying where people lived, but it should not be used as a present-day retail catchment or a current municipal boundary.
Evidence: Census 2011 C-01: Population by religious community, India
Use the table for context, with the date attached
These counts support school reference work, historical demographic comparisons and carefully labeled geographic research. They do not tell you a person’s language, food habits, income or purchasing preferences. Applying a state-level religious share to an individual household would confuse an aggregate distribution with personal information.
A present-day population projection should not be multiplied by the 2011 religion percentages and published as an official current religion count. Such a calculation would assume unchanged composition and compatible boundaries. If used as a private scenario, it would need to be labeled as an assumption, with its limitations visible.
C-01 was released on 25 August 2015, but its reference year remains 2011. This page preserves the source counts and their categories. The original workbook, its official catalog entry and retrieval provenance are available in the source record, so the historical values can be checked independently.
Evidence: Census 2011 C-01: Population by religious community, India