NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 129 of 150

Correct — A, Uttar Pradesh. Census 2011 counted about 97,800 inhabited villages in Uttar Pradesh, comfortably the largest number in any Indian state. The reasoning behind it is straightforward: Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state, about three-quarters of its people live in rural areas, and the Ganga plain supports a dense scatter of small settlements rather than a few large ones. The other three states in the list are all in the forty-thousand band, so the gap is wide and the ranking is not close.

• (b)Odisha — Odisha does have an unusually high village count for its population, because its hill and forest districts are settled in many small hamlets, but its total is well under half of Uttar Pradesh's.
• (c)Rajasthan — Rajasthan is the largest state by area, which makes it a tempting answer, but area is not the variable here. Much of its territory is thinly peopled desert, so it carries far fewer inhabited villages than the Ganga plain.
• (d)Maharashtra — Maharashtra is the second most populous state, but it is also among the most urbanised, so a much larger share of its population lives in towns and cities rather than in villages.

The Census of India records every village as a revenue unit, and then separates those with at least one resident from those with none. Census 2011 enumerated more than six lakh villages across the country, of which roughly six lakh were inhabited and the rest — abandoned settlements, forest blocks and revenue villages that exist only on paper — were uninhabited. The count of villages therefore depends on two different things: how many people live in rural areas, and how finely those people are distributed into separate settlements.

The booklet prints 'inhabitated'; the census word is 'inhabited', and that distinction is doing real work in the question. A state can carry thousands of revenue villages with nobody living in them, so the uninhabited figure is stripped out before the ranking is made. The way to reason to the answer without memorising numbers is to ask which state has both the largest rural population and a settlement pattern of many small villages — and that is Uttar Pradesh on both counts.

• Census 2011 covered 28 states and 8 union territories, 640 districts, 5,924 sub-districts, 7,935 towns and more than six lakh villages.
• Uttar Pradesh returned about 97,800 inhabited villages, the highest of any state; the distractor states here are all in the forty-thousand range.
• The census separates inhabited from uninhabited villages, so a state's revenue-village count is always higher than its inhabited-village count.
• Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state and roughly three-quarters of its people were recorded as rural in 2011.

• Reading the question as 'largest state' and marking Rajasthan; the count follows rural population, not area.
• Forgetting the word 'inhabited' — total village counts, including uninhabited ones, are higher and can reorder some comparisons.
• Assuming the most populous state is also the most urbanised; Uttar Pradesh is the opposite.

Census questions in NDA are almost always a single ranking — highest, lowest, or a descending order — over four states, so the fastest preparation is to fix the top and bottom state for each major census indicator.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  According to Census 2011, which state has the largest rural population in India?

  • (a)Bihar
  • (b)Uttar Pradesh
  • (c)West Bengal
  • (d)Maharashtra

  Answer(b) Uttar Pradesh — it is both the most populous state and largely rural, which is also why it leads on inhabited villages.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Census of India, a village recorded in the revenue records but with no resident population at the time of enumeration is classified as

  • (a)a census town
  • (b)an uninhabited village
  • (c)a deserted hamlet
  • (d)an out-growth

  Answer(b) an uninhabited village — the census reports inhabited and uninhabited villages separately, which is why this question specifies 'inhabited'.