CHENNAI, INDIA, August 27 2015 (Times of India): India has 2.87 million people who have no faith in any religion — 0.24% of the country’s population of 1.21 billion — according to the 2011 census, which was the first to include a non-faith category . The figure includes atheists, rationalists as well as those not interested in any religion but believe in some unknown force. A majority of people who ticked the non-faith category live in rural areas as compared to those in urban areas. More males than females said that they did not believe in any faith. Uttar Pradesh accounts for the most people registered as ‘non-faith’ (582,000) than any other state. Bihar, Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu all have more than 100,000 people in the category.
TN, perhaps more than any other state, has a history of atheism. It started with E.V. Ramasamy (1879-1973), popularly known as Periyar, who propagated atheism (or rationalism) in the early 1900s. Since then, the political party he founded, Dravidar Kazhagam, and members of its offshoots, the Dravidian parties like DMK, have had avowed atheists. Over time, though, some of the non-believers found religion and perform yagas that Periyar had fought against tooth and nail.
“It is welcome that our voice has been recorded for the first time in the census,” Dravida Kazhagam leader K. Veeramani said. But he believes there are many more non-believers than the census department recorded.