JOIN USLiving standards in Tamil Nadu seems to have bettered over the last 10 years as the state has recorded a surge in mobile phone, television, LPG usage, suggests the “House-listing and Housing Census 2011.”
Releasing the census, State Census Director S Gopalakrishnan said the a record 75 per cent of the 1.85 crore household in the state has one form of telephone or the other, as against the national average of 63 per cent. In the 2001 census, the figure stood at 48 per cent.
Further, the number of households with a television set has doubled over the last ten years. While 42 per cent of the households boasted of a television in 2001, the figure stands at 87 per cent in 2011, as against the all-India average of 47 per cent, Gopalakrishnan said.
Of this, 85 per cent of the rural household and 89 pert cent of the urban households have a television set. In fact, Tamil Nadu stood second in the country in terms of maximum TV penetration, next to New Delhi at 93 per cent. However, the number of radio and transistor users, sans those who use cell phones with FMs, have slipped from 44 per cent in 2001 to 23 per cent in 2011. Even in this regard, TN is better than rest of the country where number of transistor and radio users stands at 20 per cent.
The state is way above rest of the country when it comes to LPG usage. While the national average stands at 28 per cent, 48 per cent of the state’s population use LPG.
However, the state lags behind when it comes to sanitation. The number of households without a latrine declined from 64 per cent in 2001 to 52 per cent in 2011. Thus, only 52 per cent of the households have individual toilets.