Average Height in India (Men & Women)

India's average height in numbers

The average Indian man born in 1996 stands 164.9 cm (5′5″) tall as an adult, and the average Indian woman stands 152.6 cm (5′0″). These figures come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), a worldwide network of health scientists. In 2016 they pooled 1,472 population-based studies, covering more than 18.6 million people whose height had actually been measured, and estimated mean adult height for everyone born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries.

Those numbers put India near the bottom of the world table. Of the 200 countries in that dataset, Indian men rank 178th and Indian women 192nd. The gap between Indian men and women is 12.3 cm, a little smaller than in the United States or Pakistan.

To picture these heights, the site's 165 cm to feet page shows a typical Indian man next to familiar objects, and 152 cm does the same for the typical Indian woman.

What a birth cohort means and how the data was built

NCD-RisC does not report the height of everyone alive today. It reports the expected adult height of a birth cohort, meaning all the people born in one year, measured at age 18. The 1996 cohort is the most recent one in the study, and it is the headline figure on this page. An Indian man in his fifties today belongs to an older cohort and is, on average, a little shorter. That is partly because his generation grew up in poorer conditions and partly because people lose some height as they age.

The method matters for India in particular. The NCD-RisC paper notes that its data came from probability samples. It excluded surveys built around particular castes, occupations, ethnic minorities or patients recruited through clinics, because those groups could differ from the population as a whole. The authors also point out that community and state-level studies, which are common in India, vary more than national surveys. Their Bayesian model gives such studies less weight.

India also has unusually deep historical data. The study left out the 1860–1895 birth cohorts because only six countries had measurements for people born that early, and India was one of them, along with American Samoa, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the United States.

A century of very slow change

The most striking fact about Indian height is how little it moved during the 20th century, compared with almost any other large country.

Across a hundred years, Indian men gained 2.9 cm and Indian women 4.6 cm. Over the same period, according to NCD-RisC, South Korean women gained 20.2 cm and Iranian men 16.5 cm, the largest increases in the world. The researchers singled out South Asia, along with parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as a region with little change in height over the century. They also found that the rise appears to have stopped in India and Bangladesh at a much lower level than in East Asia, about 5–10 cm shorter than where Japan and South Korea leveled off.

Look at the last two rows. Men born in 1976 and 1996 have essentially the same average height, 165.0 cm and 164.9 cm. Indian women gained only 0.5 cm over the last 40 years of cohorts in the study. Over the same period, average height in China kept climbing.

What India's own surveys show

India's main source of measured height is the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), run by the International Institute for Population Sciences for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare as part of the international Demographic and Health Surveys program. NFHS field teams measure women aged 15–49 and, in recent rounds, men too.

Recent declines in men's height

In 2021, researchers at Jawaharlal Nehru University published a study in PLOS ONE comparing NFHS-2 (1998–99), NFHS-3 (2005–06) and NFHS-4 (2015–16). Their results line up with the plateau in the NCD-RisC estimates, and for men they are worse.

• Men aged 15–25 were on average 1.10 cm shorter in NFHS-4 than in NFHS-3.
• Men aged 26–50 were 0.86 cm shorter.
• Women aged 26–50 gained 0.13 cm, a small but statistically significant improvement.
• Women aged 15–25 fell by 0.12 cm, a change the authors describe as not statistically significant.

The declines were not spread evenly. Women in the poorest wealth group lost height in both age bands, by 0.63 cm among 15–25-year-olds and 0.57 cm among 26–50-year-olds. Young Scheduled Tribe women lost 0.42 cm. Women in the richer wealth groups gained height. The authors wrote that, at a time when heights are rising almost everywhere, India's decline "is alarming and demands an urgent enquiry."

Short stature in NFHS-5

The most recent full round, NFHS-5 (2019–21), does not publish a national mean height. It does report how many women are shorter than 145 cm, a threshold the survey uses as a marker of short maternal stature. Nationally, 11.5% of women aged 15–49 were below that line, almost the same as the 11.1% recorded in 2015–16.

The breakdowns show how closely height follows living standards:

The poorest women are three times as likely as the richest to fall under 145 cm.

Regional differences inside India

India's states differ far more in height than many countries do from one another. NFHS-5's state tables show the share of women under 145 cm ranging from 4.5% in Kerala and 4.8% in Punjab to 18.2% in Meghalaya, 18.1% in Jharkhand and 17.8% in Bihar. Haryana (5.2%) and Mizoram (6.1%) sit near the low end. West Bengal (14.9%), Uttar Pradesh (14.8%) and Assam (14.4%) sit near the high end.

State trends also diverged in the PLOS ONE study. Between NFHS-3 and NFHS-4, women aged 26–50 grew taller in Kerala (+2.51 cm), Sikkim (+1.88 cm), Punjab (+1.14 cm) and Jammu and Kashmir (+1.11 cm), but became shorter in Delhi (−2.46 cm), Madhya Pradesh (−0.64 cm) and Bihar (−0.48 cm). Among men aged 26–50, Himachal Pradesh recorded the largest gain (+1.06 cm) and Karnataka the largest fall (−2.04 cm). Among younger men aged 15–25, Nagaland was the only state with a statistically significant gain (+1.27 cm).

The authors also note a limitation of older data. India's earlier nutrition monitoring, the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau surveys, covered only about ten states, so they cannot represent the whole country the way NFHS does.

Why Indian height stalled

Height is a cumulative record of childhood. Our World in Data, summarizing the research literature, describes nutrition as one of the strongest influences on adult height. Most stunting happens in the first two years of life, when growth is fastest, and repeated childhood illness diverts nutrients away from growth.

India's child stunting figures show the scale of the problem. NFHS-5 found that 36% of children under five were too short for their age. That is lower than the 62.7% recorded in 1989 in the WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data, but it is still one of the highest rates of any large country. Adults born in the 1990s grew up when well over a third of young children were stunted, and their average adult height reflects that.

Social inequality has left a mark too. Our World in Data cites research finding that high-caste Indians were on average about 4.5 cm taller than low-caste Indians in the 20th century, and notes that genetics is an unlikely explanation for that gap. The PLOS ONE authors make a similar point about children. An earlier study they cite found that a five-year-old Scheduled Tribe girl in NFHS-3 was about 2 cm shorter than a general-caste girl, and that socioeconomic differences accounted for the entire gap.

India compared with its neighbors

Indian adults are close in height to people in the rest of South Asia and clearly shorter than people in China.

Pakistani men are 2.0 cm taller than Indian men, while Bangladeshi and Nepali men are shorter. The gap with China is the most telling. Chinese and Indian men born in 1896 were within a centimeter of each other (161.0 cm and 162.0 cm). By the 1996 cohort, Chinese men were almost 7 cm taller, and Chinese women 7.1 cm taller. NCD-RisC describes height continuing to rise in China while the rise in South Asia stopped early.

For more countries, the average height by country hub lists all 200.

Height in everyday life in India

Average figures are useful for planning. Garment, footwear and furniture makers who size products for Indian customers are working with a population in which the typical woman is about 152–153 cm and the typical man about 165 cm. Both are well below the averages in Europe or North America. NFHS-5's finding that one in nine women is under 145 cm also matters for health services. Researchers, including the NCD-RisC team, link short maternal stature to higher risks of small-for-gestational-age and preterm births.

If you want to see where your own height sits, the height percentile calculator places a measurement against reference data. Keep in mind that a person who would be average in India would look short in a Dutch or American crowd, and the reverse is true too.

Reading these numbers sensibly

A few cautions apply. The NCD-RisC figure is a model-based estimate for a cohort at age 18, not a census of today's adults. NFHS figures are direct measurements, but the women's figures cover only ages 15–49 and, in NFHS-5, are mainly reported as the share below a cutoff rather than as a mean. The two sources tell the same story, however: Indian adult height rose slowly for most of the 20th century, stalled for people born after the mid-1970s, and has recently slipped among men and the poorest women. Better child nutrition, as falling stunting rates suggest, should eventually show up as taller adults, but the surveys published so far do not yet show that turnaround.