India's most crowded states

Which Indian state has the most people? Let's find out!

India is huge. Over a billion and four hundred million people live here, spread across many states. Think of India as a giant school with many classrooms. Some classrooms are packed, others are quiet.

States are like those classrooms. Some hold hundreds of millions of people, and some hold very few.

Here are the top five, using census numbers in crores. One crore is ten million people. Uttar Pradesh is number one, with about twenty crore people. That is more than many whole countries! Uttar Pradesh sits in the north, on the fertile plains of the river Ganga.

• UP: about 20 crore

Why so many people? Flat land, rivers and rich soil make farming easy, so families settle there.

Farms feed people, people build towns, and towns attract even more people. It becomes a cycle.

Maharashtra comes second. It has Mumbai, a huge coastal city where people come to find jobs.

Bihar is third. It also lies on the Ganga plains, so its story is a lot like Uttar Pradesh. Now the opposite. Tiny states like Sikkim have very few people, because mountains make living and farming hard.

Let's check what you learned. Uttar Pradesh has the most people, followed by Maharashtra and Bihar, because flat fertile land and big cities attract families.