The UN has spent a few months dizzying the international media as it pondered the exact moment when India would deliver the demographic surprise to China. The only sure thing is that this would happen in 2023. Even the dethroned Chinese accepted the maxim. But it has been impossible for the UN agencies, which have been making projections separately these months, to coordinate to mark a date on the calendar. This has led to confusion in the press, with newspapers and television publishing, when it best suited them, the headline that India was already the most populous country.
The problem is basic: nobody really knows how many people live in India. The vast nation in question has not carried out a census since 2011. The one that had to be carried out in 2021 was delayed with the excuse of the pandemic. And they are not even updated, beyond 2019, the estimates that are usually published by the Government of the nationalist Narendra Modi. Even the internal forecasts of the Indian institutes have been competing with the UN these months to see who messed up the most with the data.
In the midst of all these gaps, the majority view among international demographers, many UN analysts, and the technicians who have been providing the Indian government with annual sample surveys for the past few years is that all this chaos does not cover up the historical fact: India is already, surely, the most populous country on the planet.
This last week of April, as the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has now announced, the South Asian nation will end up touching 1,426 million inhabitants. That figure was already reached by China last year, but since then its population has not stopped falling, unlike its neighbor with which it shares a long and disputed border in the Himalayas.
From the Population Fund of the international organization, they said last week that India would have around three million more people by mid-year than China, who had been occupying the throne since the United Nations population records began in 1950. Although most demographers agree that China has been the most densely populated country in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire.
In 1955, there were 2.8 billion people on Earth. Today, that is the population that only the two Asian giants add up, which also represent more than a third of the world population, which at the end of last year surpassed the barrier of 8,000 million.
The Indian census has not stopped growing, quadrupling in just over half a century, while China faces a historic demographic recession. Last year, for the first time since 1960, the number of deaths in the second world power exceeded that of births. Dragged by the one-child policy (defunct since 2016, you can now have three) and with the cost of living soaring, the fertility rate in China has fallen to just 1.2 children. But in India, with an average of two births per mother, that rate has also been slowing down from the average of almost six births in the 1960s.
“India experienced rapid population growth, nearly 2% per year, for much of the second half of the last century. Over time, death rates fell and life expectancy rose, adding more than a billion people. since independence in 1947, and its population is expected to grow for another 40 years,” said demographer Tim Dyson of the London School of Economics. “Increased income and improved access to health and education have helped Indian women have fewer children than before, effectively flattening the growth curve.”
A growth that, as happened in China, in the new most populous country in the world is quite uneven. In India, which is about a third the size of its giant Asian neighbor in terms of land area, most residents are clustered in the northern states. Fertility rates vary drastically if you look at one side of the map or the other.
In the wealthier and more advanced South, in addition to providing women with greater access to contraceptives and family planning services, they have better educational resources, more job opportunities and a higher social status, which pushes families to be smaller but more prosperous.
Two examples provided by the most recent National Family Health Survey, 2021: In Tamil Nadu in the south, 84% of women, averaging 1.8 children, are literate, compared to 55% in the Bihan state, in the north, where women average three children.
In India, many fear that this new position as the most populous country could eventually overwhelm its resources in a land where extreme inequality continues to be the great hindrance: poverty, exacerbated by food inflation, is widespread especially in the north. , and ethnic tensions, fueled by a government increasingly cornered towards Hindu nationalism, are growing between regions so disparate that they are swaying differently in the face of the demographic boom.
The trend for the future is that these contrasts will continue to be based on the fact that India has a very young population: one in five people under the age of 25 in the world was born in this South Asian country. The median age of the Indian population is 28 years, while that of China is 10 years older. Just looking at babies (up to four years old), India has around 113 million, double that of China and more than the entire population of Spain and Italy combined.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project