censusdatademographyindiapopulation
Trying to source population data for every village, town and city in India. I have been able to extract data for 2001 & 2011 from the census site, but am having a tough time finding a reliable source for data from 1981 and 1991.
Any thoughts as to where this may be found?
For administrative boundaries, look at GADM database of Global Administrative Areas Select India, and choose "level 3".
Edit: here's a screen grab of the resulting KML file, looks like it matches the link you provided, but GADM has it for the whole country.
You can get population data from Geonames.
Not sure about the source of the population data, although it seems that such data coincides with Wikipedia's population data, which is from 2011.
You would also need to validate that there are more than 600.000 Indian villages in Geonames.
Regarding an automated way, you could follow this tutorial by Tim Sutton for extracting, storing and visualizing the data in QGIS.
Best Answer
As I have said in my comment, you will not get the layers with 2011 census information.
However village layer with 2001 census information are available from Survey of India at a fixed price.
I have also found some data at this link: https://archive.org/details/IndiaVillageBoundaries
I cannot vouch for its heritage, completeness or accuracy, but what little I have checked, looks ok to me.