Shirdi is a town and falls under the jurisdiction of municipal council popularly known as Shirdi Nagar Panchayat, located in Rahata Tahasil (i.e. taluka) in Ahmednagar District in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is accessible via the Ahmednagar - Manmad State Highway No.10, approximately 83 km from Ahmednagar and 15 km from Kopargaon. It is located 185 km east of the Western Seashore line (the Ahmednagar - Manmad road), which is a very busy route. Shirdi is best known as the late 19th century home of the popular guru Shirdi Sai Baba.
As of the 2001 India census, the population of Shirdi stood at 26,169. Males constitute 53% of the population and females 47%. Shirdi has an average literacy rate of 70%, higher than the national average of 59.5%: male literacy is 76%, and female literacy is 62%. In Shirdi, 15% of the population is under 6 years of age.. But, Shirdi being a pilgrimage centre, it also has a large amount of floating population. On any given day some 25,000 devotees come for darshan. On holidays the number reaches to about half a million people. Due to easy availability of jobs, a lot of migrant population, mainly of unskilled labourers from UP, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh etc. also reside here. They are not part of any census.
Shirdi is located approximately 296 km from Mumbai, capital of Maharashtra in India.It is called the Land of Sai.Helicopter services are available to Shirdi. The helipad is owned by Shri Sai Baba Sansthan Trust. One has to take the permission of the trust to land here. Shirdi now has a new railway station called "Sainagar Shirdi", which became operational in March 2009. The project was to be completed in 2001, but was actually completed only in 2009 due to various reasons. The new railway station is located just 2 KMs from Baba's Temple in Shirdi. The Shirdi Sansthan also provides bus transportation from the train station to their guest houses for those devotees that have chosen to reserve a room and stay at the newly constructed Sansthan guest houses (for most updated information pertaining to this, please see the Shirdi Sai Sansthan website).
As of 2010, there are trains from Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Mumbai (Maharashtra), Vishakhapatnam via Secunderabad (Andhra Pradesh) and other cities/states that have Shirdi railway station as their terminal stop. This means that devotees can get off the train at the Shirdi railway station and reach Baba's Mandir in less than 10 minutes (unlike in earlier years when one had to take a taxi or bus from Manmad and it took over an hour to reach Shirdi).