Counting millions of people is never an easy task, but according to the United Nations, India now has more people than China, an epochal shift in global demographics that occurred in late April.
Most of the world grew up with China holding the title of the world’s most populous country, but decades of restrictive policies limiting families to one child have dramatically slowed China’s birth rate, allowing India to take in advance.
But having a chart-topping squad isn’t necessarily a title most countries covet.
A few years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concern about India’s ‘population explosion’ and praised families who carefully considered the impact of more babies – on themselves and on the nation.
“In 21st century India, the ability to achieve dreams starts with a person, starts with a family. If the people are not educated, not healthy, then neither home nor country can be happy. said Modi.
So how did India’s population get so big and how long will it last?
CNN analyzed UN data on the world’s demographic outlook and spoke with experts to dig deep into the headline numbers on the details surrounding India’s changing demographics.
How did India get so big?
Unsurprisingly, fertility is key to understanding what drives a country’s population increase or decrease. It is commonly accepted that the average fertility rate of a country – children per woman – must be 2.1 for the population to maintain itself – and even more to grow.
In the 1960s, when today’s grandparents had children, India’s fertility rate was 6, about the same as some African countries today.
But, according to the government, India’s total fertility rate fell to 2.0 during the last national assessment period of 2019 to 2021, from 3.4 from 1992 to 1993. The increase in population despite a decline in the fertility rate can be explained by “momentum.”
“When the fertility rate drops, the population continues to grow for several decades. And that’s because younger and larger cohorts continue to reach that age when they become parents,” said Frank Swiaczny, senior researcher at the Federal Institute for Population Research.
So, even with replacement or sub-replacement fertility, India’s population will continue to grow slowly due to the huge number of women entering reproductive age.
Unsurprisingly for a nation of its size, India’s fertility rate is uneven across the country, contributing to a north-south divide that sees more babies produced in the north. But even there, the numbers aren’t off the charts.
“What really surprised us was that the highest fertility rate in India – 3.0 in Bihar – isn’t even that high,” said Barbara Seligman, chief strategy and growth officer. and senior vice president of PRB, a nonprofit group that focuses on population data and demographic research.
“It’s really striking how many states are below replacement level,” Seligman added. All but five states – Bihar, Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Manipur – are at this level, and notably, they are all in the north.
In the southern states, a different pattern is emerging.
For example, Goa has a fertility rate similar to some southern European countries, which are currently struggling to support an aging population with a shrinking workforce. It’s a trend that experts say India’s leaders would do well not ignore.
According to the UN classification, India is now an “aging society”, which means that 7% of its population is aged 65 or over. In some states, for example Kerala in southern India, the population over 65 has doubled in the past 30 years and is now at 12%.
The same pattern will spread to more states given the low total fertility rate.
“We are going to see more and more states over the next 30 years aging like Kerala is now,” Seligman said.
India’s population growth is slowing
India may have overtaken China in terms of total population, but UN data also shows its growth rate has slowed.
Between 1971 and 1981, the Indian population grew by an average of 2.2% per year. From 2001 to 2011, this rate had slowed to 1.5% and it is even lower today. According to UN projections, India’s population is expected to peak at around 1.7 billion in 2064.
Currently, more than 40% of the country’s residents are under the age of 25, and the estimated median age in 2023 is 28 – nearly a decade younger than China’s – according to data from the ‘UN.
In 2021, India’s working-age population stood at over 900 million and is expected to reach 1 billion within the next decade, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Not only is this massive and relatively low-paid workforce young, but they are largely English-speaking, digitally savvy and have a reputation for entrepreneurship, making the country a big draw for Western companies seeking of an alternative manufacturing center to China.
But India’s contribution to the share of the world’s working-age population is expected to slow in the coming decades, giving way to a younger population of workers emerging from Africa.
India may have the lion’s share of today’s working-age people, but experts say the nation needs strong policies to capitalize on its youth.
“A lot of people is not enough, we have to come up with a holistic plan,” Sonalde Desai, director of the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and professor at the University of Maryland, told CNN.
“We need people who have the skills to do some of the high-value jobs and an economy that produces those high-value jobs.”
Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, said it was “imperative for India to make progress in realizing its aspirations to be a developed country”.
What’s next for India?
Although it remains one of the world’s poorest countries per capita, India is rising in global economic rankings – its nearly $3.5 trillion economy is now the world’s fifth largest and one of the fastest growing.
In 2023, the World Bank expects India to outperform all other major economies with growth of 6.6% – compared to 4.3% for China and only 0.5% for the United States, while according to some projections, it should take the third place within the next 10 years and become only the third country with a GDP of 10 trillion dollars by 2035.
Yet despite its wealth, India’s wealth is not evenly distributed.
Poverty remains a daily reality for millions of Indians, and experts say that while the country has a large population of young people ready and willing to work, compared to other countries the figures show that there is no not enough jobs for them.
The problem is worse in the economically disadvantaged regions of the north, which are heavily dependent on agriculture. Uttar Pradesh, for example, is home to 17% of India’s population but has only 9% of its industrial jobs.
Sabina Dewan, a visiting senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, says population growth can be a “tremendous productive force for the economy”, but that economic growth “is built on the provision of good quality, productive jobs and well paid.
And that starts with investing more in education beyond primary school, especially for women.
“We need to strengthen our secondary school system, make it safer and closer to where the girls are, because many parents do not send their daughters to secondary schools, which are far away, due to security concerns” , Muttreja said.
Once they left school, women’s level of labor force participation – the estimate of the active labor force and those looking for work – was only 19 % in 2021, according to World Bank data. This is less than half of the overall activity rate of 46%, already one of the lowest in Asia. The comparative rates for China and the United States were 68% and 61%.
Not only does India need better policies to get women into work, it needs to make sure they can stay there, Desai said. For this, more options are needed for temporary contraception to give women more control over childbearing, she said.
Education is the best birth control pill that can be given to a woman, Muttreja added.
Dewan of the Center for Policy Research said that if India failed to strike the right balance, it risked wasting the huge advantage of being the world’s most populous country with the highest share of human capital by age. to work.
“The challenge of education, training and a sufficient number of good quality jobs is huge,” she said.
“If we don’t create enough good jobs, we waste the enormous potential of our workers. And we may be dealing with a youthful population that has greater aspirations than ever before, but few income-generating opportunities.
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