Human Geography: Population, Migration and Settlement
This domain tests how population data are collected and compared, why people move, and how settlements are patterned on the ground.
Population data
India's census is decennial; the 2011 census recorded about 1.21 billion for India and 3.12 crore for Assam, with Assam's density at 398 persons per km² and a sex ratio of 958 females per 1,000 males. Density is population divided by area. Growth has two components: natural increase (births minus deaths) and net migration. The demographic transition traces movement from high birth and death rates to low ones through stages of falling death rates first.
Migration
Push factors include unemployment, floods, land fragmentation and conflict; pull factors include jobs, education, healthcare and security. Types include rural–urban, seasonal, circular and international. Assam has seen long-term in-migration from Bihar and West Bengal into tea gardens and the Brahmaputra char lands, and seasonal out-migration of flood-affected households.
Settlement
Rural settlements may be compact (nucleated), dispersed or linear; in Assam, linear villages often string along roads, levees and embankments. Urban growth favours river crossings, transport nodes and administrative centres. Guwahati dominates the urban hierarchy of the north-east as a primate city, drawing migrants from surrounding states.
Worked example
A district of 12,00,000 people over 3,000 km² has density 12,00,000 ÷ 3,000 = 400 persons per km², close to Assam's average of 398.
Traps
- Reversing the sex ratio convention; it is females per 1,000 males.
- Treating growth rate and natural increase as identical - migration is excluded from natural increase.
- Calling a linear village "dispersed".