South India Becoming Focus of Economic Activity; Language Data Analysis

A report by Livemint today suggests that the economic activity in India is slowly but certainly shifting towards the south of the country. Looking at census data from the 2011 population census that was carried out across the country, it was noticed that there is a migration of people from the North and East of India towards South India, based mostly on the the fact that there has been a noticeable increase in the number of Hindi and Bengali speakers, as general markers for the languages of the Ganges basin, who have moved to states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, versus the earlier trend of Tamil and Malayalam speakers moving to cities like Delhi.

Also of note was the fact that there has been a sharp reduction in the number of people who claim Urdu as their mother tongue, with the reasons for this drop being attributed to far-reaching causes and the issues that followed surrounding the events that led up to the Rath Yatra to Ayodhya. On the other hand, those claiming Sanskrit as their mother tongue have seen a marked increase in their numbers according to the census data, a trend which has been supported by the this same fact. However, as the data is self-reported at the time of collection, it is assumed that some discrepancies in actual reporting may have resulted. In some cases, it is assumed that political pressures could have forced people to report data to suit the commonly accepted norms, such as Urdu-speakers in Maharashtra possibly claiming Hindi as their mother tongue due to the surge of the Marathi Manoos movement at the time that the census was taken.