Mandla district
Mandla District is a district of Madhya Pradesh state in central India. The town of Mandla is administrative headquarters of the district. It is part of Jabalpur Division.
The district has an area of 8771 km², and a population of 779,414. It has 9 development blocks, 4 tehsils, and 1214 villages. It lies in the Mahakoshal region, and most of the district lies in the basin of the Narmada River.Economy
In 2006 the Ministry of Panchayati Raj named one of the country's 250 most backward districts. It is one of the 24 districts in Madhya Pradesh currently receiving funds from the Backward Regions Grant Fund Programme.Demographics
According to the 2011 census Mandla District has a population of 1,054,905, roughly equal to the nation of Cyprus or the US state of Rhode Island. This gives it a ranking of 432nd in India. The district has a population density of . Its population growth rate over the decade 2001-2011 was 17.81%. Mandla has a sex ratio of 1005 females for every 1000 males, and a literacy rate of 68.28%.Languages
At the time of the 2011 Census of India, 89.01% of the population in the district spoke Chhattisgarhi, 10.22% Gondi and 0.41% Gujarati as their first language.
Languages spoken include Gondi, Agariya, an Austroasiatic tongue with approximately 72,000 speakers; Bagheli, which has a lexical similarity of 72-91% with Hindi and is spoken by about 7,800,000 people in Bagelkhand; and Bharia, a Dravidian language spoken by at least 200,000 members of the Bharia tribe and written in the Devanagari script.Ecology
Much of the district is forested, and it is home to Kanha National Park, a Project Tiger sanctuary. Kanha has the largest number of tigers in India. The park has won national awards for good management and infrastructure. The park is open year round except for July and August. The district is also home to Mandla Plant Fossils National Park.
However, once upon a time Kanha and Satpura forest region, now famous as tiger reserves, were ruled by wild Indian elephants and lions.
