Mumbai Witnessed 6 Pct Fall in Population

Yet, the growth decline can't undermine the challenges posed by the existing population. In the past decade five lakh more people were added in Mumbai, taking its population to 1.24 crore, with an average of 20,038 persons packed into every square kilometre in the city and 20,925 persons in the extended suburbs.

D P Singh of the centre for research methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences said people moved from the city to the suburbs when the real estate prices shot up, a shift that was now heading further north to neighboring townships such as Navi Mumbai and Thane. This possibly explains why Thane's population in 2011 has gone up at a rate nearly four times that of Mumbai's suburbs. He said "The city limits of Mumbai are saturated which explains the decade-on-decade decline of population. No new industry has come up in Mumbai recently and economic surveys have shown that employment is falling, both in terms of establishments as well as employers," as reported by ET. The rehabilitation of slums to remote areas may explain some shifts.

Most notably, the declining population growth indicates the success of population stabilization in terms of declining total fertility rate (average number of children per women) as well as better healthcare facilities in terms of lower mortality, said Arokiasamy.  He added that "It means there is faster diffusion of family planning norms here than in the past," reported ET.