India recorded 4,451,753 Jains at the 2011 census, about 0.37 per cent of the population, and world estimates run to four or five million. No credible source splits that figure between Digambara and Svetambara, and the confident proportions sometimes quoted should not be relied on. Digambaras are concentrated in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Monastic numbers are very small. A survey conducted in the 1970s and 1980s counted something like 125 Digambara monks and 50 nuns, against far larger Svetambara figures. That count is badly dated and should be read only as an order of magnitude.
Authority is decentralised, and the tradition's principal internal division concerns it. Bhattarakas are clerical administrators holding institutional office; the Bisapantha accepts their authority and the Terapanthi, strong in Rajasthan, rejects it. Further groupings exist alongside, including the Taranpanthi, who reject image worship.
The live legal question is sallekhana, the vow to fast to death, undertaken by a Jain who judges the body no longer capable of sustaining practice. In August 2015 the Rajasthan High Court held it to be suicide, punishable under the penal code, and not an essential practice of Jainism and therefore not protected as religious freedom. The Jain community petitioned, and the Supreme Court of India stayed the ruling on 31 August 2015. The practice remains lawful pending a final decision. The tradition's own position is that sallekhana is the opposite of suicide (undertaken without passion, with the community's knowledge, and only when death is already near), and that the court applied a category that does not fit.