Shaheer Ahmed
China will soon no longer be the country with the most people, a title it has held for a long time. India’s population is projected to hit 1,425,775,850 people by the end of this month, which will put it on par with and then past the population of mainland China. This prediction is based on the latest figures and projections of the world’s population by the United Nations. The fact that China is no longer the most populous country in the world is a statistic that was warned by the UN a year ago.
China’s population peaked in 2022 when there were 1.426 billion people. Since then, the population figures in China have been going down. The number of Chinese people could drop below 1 billion by the end of the century, according to predictions. India’s population, on the other hand, is projected to keep growing for several decades.
China had one of the lowest birth rates in the world in 2022, with only 1.2 babies per woman. India’s average fertility rate of 2.0 births per woman is just below the “replacement” threshold of 2.1, which is the amount needed for long-term population stability without migration.
The government has not conducted the census, which is usually done every 10 years, yet, so no one knows for sure how many people live in India. It was supposed to start in 2021, but the Covid-19 pandemic pushed it back. The government, led by prime minister Narendra Modi, has not stated when it will start.
Some people have said that the Modi government is trying to stop the census so they can hide information that could hurt them publicly. But the government says the delay is because of work that is still going on to add technology to the process.
The UN’s announcement is expected to make the Indian government feel more pressure to do the poll. Since the last census in 2011, the population is thought to have grown by almost 200 million people, which is more than the population of Brazil. Experts say that the lack of important data makes it harder to make policies and run aid schemes.
India has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and it recently passed the UK to become the fifth-largest. However, experts have said that the country needs to put more money into education and jobs to take advantage of the fact that it has a large number of young people.
India still has a lot of trouble with high young unemployment, and less than half of the people of working age are working. The number is even lower for women. Only 20% of women work in an official job, and that number is going down as India grows.
