Global Courant 2023-04-19 18:25:50
By the middle of this year, India will overtake China to become the world’s most populous country, the United Nations predicted on Wednesday.
According to the UN, by July this year India will have at least three million more inhabitants than China. (NIHARIKA KULKARNI / Reuters)
The forecast represents decades of trends in India and a position that the South Asian country will likely maintain for centuries to come.
China has been viewed as the world’s most populous country since the fall of the Roman Empire, but pre-partition British India may have outstripped it for a while.
How did that happen?
China took decisive action to reduce population growth in the 1980s and imposed a strictly enforced one-child policy on its people.
It has become increasingly prosperous in recent years – a phenomenon consistently linked to smaller family sizes – but is now reaping the demographic whirlwind with an aging and shrinking population.
India launched its own sterilization and family planning campaigns in the 1970s, including a notorious effort to target men.
Despite the associated health risks, female sterilization is by far the most popular method of contraception now focused on women.
Still, India’s fertility rates continue to be higher than its northern neighbor, giving it a much younger – and now larger – population: there are about 650 million Indians under the age of 25.
What are the effects?
New Delhi and Beijing compete for geopolitical influence, and the change to the title of “most populous” will reinforce India’s status as a rising power – one that is wooed by the West as an alternative to Beijing.
It will also strengthen New Delhi’s claim to a long-sought permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In addition to overtaking China, India has a larger population than the other four veto member states combined.
Providing meals to so many people causes major environmental and infrastructure problems.
However, a large and young workforce has significant economic benefits: India is the world’s fastest growing major economy and last year replaced the former colonial power Britain as fifth in the global GDP rankings.
How many in India and China?
The UN estimates that India will have 1.429 billion people by 1 July, and China will fall behind by 1.426 billion to three million.
The estimate is far from certain. because calculating real figures for such giant countries is fraught with difficulties.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics publishes a population figure every year. In January, he said mainland China had 1.412 billion people by the end of 2022.
This marked the first decline in population since Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward disaster of the early 1960s.
On the other hand, India has not published any official population statistics since the last census in 2011. At that time 1.21 billion people were registered.
Why does India not know its population?
Birth certificates only became mandatory in India in 1969, and the ten-year census that was supposed to take place in 2021 has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly after, it came to a standstill due to logistical problems.
The census is a massive application that includes an army of data enumerators. They go door to door to gather information, including religion, mother tongue, and literacy status.
Critics accuse officials of shying away from the issue in order to downplay contentious questions such as unemployment rates ahead of next year’s elections.
What does New Delhi say?
The Hindu nationalist BJP government is normally eager to support India’s achievements. However, he remained unusually reticent about the possibility of displacing China as the world’s most populous country.
The health ministry did not comment on the figures released by the UN on Wednesday, and several officially supported population clocks have been removed from public view in recent years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was still talking about India as a country of 1.3 billion people in his 2022 Independence Day speech, a milestone that experts say passed a few years ago.
Source: AFP
