India will surpass China for the first time in 2023, becoming the world's largest population country, and will maintain this title for the next few decades.
This is the latest prediction made by United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in World Population Outlook 2022. The report was released on World Population Day on July 11. The report also predicts that the global population will exceed the 8 billion mark by the end of this year.
Professor Huang Yinghong from Jindel Global University in India told First Financial reporter that China and India are the two most populous countries in the world. Both countries have now entered the 1.4 billion population mark. The actual population gap is already very small. According to different statistical methods and statistical calibers, the time points of transcendence will vary.
India originally wanted to conduct a census every 10 years in 2021, but due to the postponement of the epidemic, no results have been announced so far, but the outside world generally believes that India's population is about 1.4 billion. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China on January 17, 2022, the national population at the end of 2021 was 1.4126 billion, an increase of 480,000 from the end of last year.
India will become the world's largest population
In "World Population Outlook 2019", it was predicted that India will surpass China around 2027, and now this time point has been forward 4 years. According to the World Population Outlook 2022, India's population will reach 1.412 billion in 2022, while China will reach 1.426 billion.
After India's population surpassed China in 2023, Huang Yinghong told the First Financial reporter that due to the rapid growth rate of India, it will further widen its distance from China. India will maintain the title of the world's largest population for a long time, and China is expected to become the world's second largest population.
According to the World Population Outlook 2022, by 2050, India's population may reach 1.668 billion, while China will drop to about 1.317 billion. This coincides with the previous predictions of Indian experts, who previously predicted that India's total population will peak at 1.6 billion around 2050 and will see a significant shrinkage by 2060.
"World Population Outlook 2022" also stated that global population growth will become more concentrated in the next 30 years, with more than half of the population growth coming from 8 countries, including India in Asia, Pakistan and Philippines , and Egypt in Africa, and 5 countries including Egypt .
How to mine India’s demographic dividend?
Huang Yinghong told the First Financial reporter that India’s current population structure is relatively young, but “to be converted into a dividend, there must be good education, industries, and sufficient social respect and freedom.” He believes that if India wants to accelerate its development, it needs to do the above-mentioned work to fully discover its potential.
Behind the growth of India's population, in addition to the high birth rate, it also includes reasons such as the decline in infant mortality rate and prolonged life expectancy.
According to statistics released by the Indian official in June 2022, the mortality rate of infants under one year old in India has dropped significantly from 129 per thousand people in 1971 to 20 per thousand people in 2020. However, the regional differences are very obvious. For example, the relatively wealthy Kerala in the south has 6 cases per 1,000 people, while the Madhya Pradesh in the north has 38 cases per 1,000 people, showing a north-south difference.
There are also obvious differences in population fertility rates due to different levels of economic and social development in India. For example, taking the Goa in the south, which has the highest urbanization state in India, as an example, in the 2021 survey, the local total fertility rate was 1.3, while in the Bihar in the north, the total fertility rate was 3.0.
India’s Ministry of Health released the “Fifth National Family Survey Report (2019-2021)” in December 2021, which shows that India’s total fertility rate has dropped to 2.0. The sum of fertility rate refers to the average number of children a woman has during childbearing age. It is generally believed that if the total fertility rate is below 2.1 for a long time, population replacement will not be achieved and the population will enter a decline channel.
However, experts pointed out that this data does not mean that India's population will shrink immediately, because India's population is still young overall, and it will take a long time to achieve population replacement. Therefore, the population will not only not decrease, but will also grow in the short term.
India's population plan was proposed in 1952 and is the first country in the world to use family planning as its national policy. However, this policy, except for the time when Indira Gandhi served as prime minister, has always been based on encouragement and advocacy, and the effect is very limited in the short term.
Huang Yinghong told the First Financial reporter that the decline in fertility rate in India is generally the result of economic development. At the same time, the Indian government has long been promoting and encouraging the reduction of fertility rates through various methods. The current federal government hopes to control fertility rates to a certain extent, but local governments may not be able to accept it. There is no consensus in the country.
