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Kanpur, 
India
4,329,973 people lived in Kanpur in 2025. It is the 97th largest of the world's 12,138 cities, and the 14th largest in India.
This is the UN's built-up area, drawn from satellite pictures and census maps rather than from the city limits, and the two can be a long way apart. The rule behind it.
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries
People · every five years · 1975 to 2050
How Kanpur grew
Count 10 people in Kanpur in 1975 and the same count gives 21.1 in 2025.
On the UN's projection it will have 4.6 million people in 2050.
projected (after 2025) · how sure the UN is: high moderate low
How to read this: read it left to right, 1975 to 2050, one column every five years, the height being people. Hatching marks the projected years. Below, a strip of the UN's confidence: strong colour where the census maps are recent and detailed, pale where they are not, blank where the place was not counted as a city.
People · your family's years · 1975 to 2050
Kanpur through your family’s years
Put in the years your family were born. You’ll see how many people lived in Kanpur in each of those years, and when each of them turned 30.
India · every city · 2025
Where it is
How to read this: Kanpur is the dot in colour with a ring around it. The grey dots are the other cities of India in 2025, 2,054 in all, led by New Delhi, each drawn with an area that matches its people. Countries next door are outlines only.
Area and built-up land · km²
How much land it covers
In 2025, Kanpur covered 306 km², and buildings, roads and other built-up land covered 76 km² of it. That is 17 m² of built-up land for each person, about a square 4 by 4 metres. Since 1975, its built-up land has grown by 86%, and its people are 2.1 times as many.
How to read this: pale is the whole of the city's land; the stronger square inside it is what is actually built on. The three are drawn to the same scale, so a larger square really is more land, and hatching means the year is the UN's projection rather than a count.
Of every 100 people in India
Its share of India
Of every 1,000 people in India in 2025, 3 lived in Kanpur, which is 4.3 million people.
How to read this: 1,000 squares, one for every 1,000th person in India; the coloured squares live in Kanpur. The grey rest live in other cities, in towns or in the countryside.
Ranked by people · 2025
Cities of a similar size
In the world, 2025
- 93 Cape Town South Africa4,508,921
- 94 Casablanca Morocco4,457,471
- 95 Mogadishu Somalia4,399,430
- 96 Harbin China4,376,259
- 97 Kanpur4,329,973
- 98 Kumasi Ghana4,297,984
- 99 Damascus Syria4,287,746
- 100 Jeddah Saudi Arabia4,284,080
- 101 Kuwait City Kuwait4,265,132
In India, 2025
- 55 Pune6,817,951
- 66 Kozhikode6,123,872
- 80 Kochi5,077,670
- 82 Lucknow5,052,444
- 97 Kanpur4,329,973
- 110 Jaipur4,071,754
- 119 Varanasi3,858,863
- 136 Indore3,476,423
- 141 Patna3,309,383
How to read this: the figure in front of a name is where that city stands among the 12,138 cities the UN counted in 2025, and each bar is its people, on one scale per list. Numbers are missing where a city has fewer than 300,000 people and so has no page of its own.
Apparatus
Sources and method
The figures for Kanpur are the UN's own, at five-year steps: an estimate for each of 1975 to 2025, then projection to 2050. Projected years are drawn hatched, and the UN publishes no range of uncertainty for a city. What a city means here, how the UN measures one, and why that number can differ from the one Kanpur publishes about itself: how the figures here are put together.
Sources: UN WUP 2025 · Natural Earth · flag-icons. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries