Population growth is caused by birth rate, death rate and migration. Rapid growth in population is a major issue in the developing world including India as these economies have limited resources and consequently suffer from the problems of overpopulation via food shortage, poor health services, poor infrastructure, and environmental degradation and so on. If govt. of such economies makes expenditure to boost one area e.g. agriculture and then industry suffers due to shortage of resources. This necessitates urgent need for stabilizing population growth in such economies to get rid of the common problems of population explosion. Against this back ground, this paper examines population characteristics based on Census data for 1901-2011 in Assam state of India which has been suffering from the problems of population explosion for long. Based on census data and by applying observational method for analyzing the objectives of the study, we find that the rate of growth of population in Assam during the period 1901-2011 under study had been found to be 849 per cent which much higher than the national average of 408 per cent over the same period. The study also focused on density of population and sex ratio in Assam during 1901-2011. There has been increasing tendency in terms of density of population over the period of 1901-2011 while sex ratio has improved during the last three decades (1991-2011) although the number of females is still less than males in  Assam.

KEY WORDS: Population, Population explosion, density of population, sex ratio.