Australian Census of 2016 Reveals Some Captivating Facts about Hindus

• As compared to 2016, this year there were more Hindus celebrating the Ganesh festival in Australia
• The Hindu population in Australia has increased by 60% in 2016 since the Census of 2011
• The median age of Hindus residing in Australia was calculated to be 31 years

Australia, August 27, 2017: The Ganesh festival of 10 days is amongst the most important Hindu festivals and this year it was celebrated on 25 August. As compared to 2016, this year there were more Hindus celebrating this festival. The Census of Population and Housing conducted in 2016 displayed that in Australia Hindu religion was growing the fastest between the year 2011 and year 2016.

As per the 2016 Census, around 440,300 people in Australia reported that they are Hindus which counts up to 1.9% of the total population. This shows an increase of 60% since the Census of 2011 which represented that the population of Hindus was 275,535.

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New South Wales, Australia's most crowded state with a population amounting to just under 7.5 million, houses around 180,000 Hindus.The Australian Capital territory had nearly 2.6% of the total population, i.e, 400,000 people reporting Hinduism as their religion.

The Australian suburbs comprising largest amount of Hindus reside in Victoria and New South Wales- Point Cook (VIC), Tarneit (VIC), Blacktown (NSW), Parramatta (NSW), and Westmead (NSW).

The interesting part is that Western Sydney houses the suburbs of NSW containing highest number of Hindus-

Wentworthville (35%), Westmead (41%), Bungarribee (37%), Girraween (43%) and Harris Park (45%).

Hinduism is more prevalent in the younger generation. The median age of people following Hinduism in Australia was calculated to be 31 years which is much lower when compared to the median age of overall Australian population, 38 years.

Only 51% of the total Hindu population living in Australia were India-born. About 27% hindus in Australia speak Hindi, 13% speak English and 12% speak Tamil with these three languages being the most common.

The Census conducted in 2016 made use of the recent approach of "digital first" that used newly built Address Register. On the night of the censes, however, an attack of distributed denial of service from another country occurred due to which the forms available online had to be shut down for longer than a day. This incident led to the generation of an independent panel was established comprising international and australian academics, statisticians and representatives of state government for reviewing and assuring quality outputs from this census.

David W Kalisch, an Australian statistician said, "The 2016 Census had a response rate of 95.1 per cent and a net undercount of 1.0 per cent, meaning the quality is comparable to both previous Australian Censuses and Censuses in other countries, such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom."

He further added, "Sixty-three per cent of people completed the Census online, embracing the digital-first approach and contributing to faster data processing and data quality improvements."

The ABS conducted a variety of quality checks, which included a Post Enumeration Survey, just to make sure that the data was reliable. "These quality assurance measures, and a range of other factors were considered and verified by the Panel," he said.

-prepared by Harsimran Kaur of NewsGram. Twitter @Hkaur