I cleaned India's Census 2011 data so you never have to

Every Indian data scientist hits the same wall. You need district-level population data. You go to censusindia.gov.in. You find hundreds of inconsistent Excel files with merged headers, footnote rows, and zero documentation. You spend a full day just loading the data before doing any actual analysis. I fixed that. Once. For everyone. What I built indiaset/census-2011 India's Census 2011 district data, clean, typed, and ready for pandas. 640 districts · 29 columns · 0 missing values Validated against official India total · LGD codes attached Load it in 4 lines from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download import pandas as pd path = hf_hub_download ( repo_id = " indiaset/census-2011 " , filename = " census_2011_districts_final.parquet " , repo_type = " dataset " ) df = pd . read_parquet ( path ) print ( df . shape ) # (640, 29) What's in it Column Description state_code Census 2011 state code state_name Official state/UT name district_code Census 2011 district code district_name District name as per Census lgd_code LGD permanent district code district_name_lgd District name as per LGD pop_total Total population pop_male Male population pop_female Female population pop_under6_total Children under 6 years pop_sc Scheduled Caste population pop_st Scheduled Tribe population literate_total Literate persons literate_male Literate males literate_female Literate females illiterate_total Illiterate persons workers_total Total workers workers_male Male workers workers_female Female workers non_workers_total Non workers literacy_rate Literate / Total × 100 sex_ratio Females per 1000 males workforce_participation Workers / Total × 100 The validation The most important test - do all 640 district populations sum to India's official total? print ( df [ ' pop_total ' ]. sum ()) # 1210854977 ✅ — exact match, zero discrepancy What the data actually shows Most literate district → Pathanamthitta, Kerala : 88.74% Least literate district → Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh : 28.77% Literacy gap acro