New Delhi India (Commonwealth News)_By mid 2023, India will become the world’s most populous country with over 1.4286 billion people, when the country is estimated to add at least 2.6 million into its population. This means that India will overtake China which is estimated to have only 1.4257 billion people. While both countries will house more than one-third of the global population billed at 8.045 billion people, both Asian giants have been experiencing a slowing of population growth.
The United Nation’s Population Fund’s (UNFPA) released its State of the World Population Report 2023 this week with the estimated demographics in Asia, which region has for long had the world’s most populated countries – India and China. The United States doesn’t even come close to the populous giants with data collating its population at a mere 340 million.
Given the rapid pace of increasing population numbers, population experts previously projected that India would surpass China as soon as this month. However, the UNFPA left out the date or month specifics of the actual Indian takeover, leaving it in the vague timing of mid-2023. The reasoning for the haziness in the timeline is the UNFPA’s officials stating ‘uncertainty about data coming in from India and China’. India’s last census was conducted way back in 2011 and the 2021 census was delayed due to the pandemic.
China’s population growth has been falling much faster than India, slowing for the first time in six decades and marking a long period of decline in population numbers. This decrease in numbers will have intense and widely permeating impacts on not just China’s economy but on the global economy as well. The prediction is that China’s population will freeze around 2030 and drop to 90% of today’s figures by 2065.
The UNFPA avers that population numbers should not trigger anxiety or create alarm which has been symptomatic to India’s slowing growth rate which averaged 1.2 per cent since 2011 compared to 1.7 per cent a decade previously. Instead, it stated that population numbers should symbolize progress, development and aspirations of individual rights and choice.
