2. Population Size and Composition of Sample Households

Characteristically, perhaps there may not be too many commonalities to make the three underlying states—UP, Rajasthan and Delhi—mutually comparable. Among the few that make them to a certain extent comparable is that each of these states belongs mostly to the northern belt of the country and they largely remain monolingual with Hindi as the dominant language of daily usage. In most other cases, all the three states are mutually far apart with Delhi being the smallest in terms of population size and UP the largest. Compared to UP and Rajasthan, Delhi provides much better socio-economic opportunities to its residents and has a considerably higher per capita income with better access to medical and public health-care services. These interstate differences are expected to embody the socio-economic and health conditions of individuals and households described in the rest of this or in subsequent chapters.