Between 1990 and 2022, China’s population rose by 24 per cent, from 1.14bn to 1.43bn. Meanwhile, India saw its population jump by 63 per cent, from 861m to 1.41bn - Credit AP Photo/Channi Anand
India to Overtake China as Most Populous Country Next Year, UN Forecast Finds
By Sarah Newey
Global Health Security Correspondent
India is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year, according to United Nations forecasts, four years sooner than previously predicted.
The shift has been driven by China’s aggressive policies to curtail population growth , which have been almost “too successful” and left the country lurching from “one extreme to another”. As soon as 2023, the country’s population will start shrinking.
Between 1990 and 2022, China’s population rose by 24 per cent, from 1.14bn to 1.43bn. Meanwhile, India saw its population jump by 63 per cent in the last three decades, from 861m to 1.41bn. The country looks set to overtake China at some point next year.
Prof John Wilmoth, director of the UN’s Population Division, told the Telegraph that India’s approach of gradually slowing population growth was more sustainable. The country was one of the first to launch a national family planning program in the 1950s, and the fertility rate has now dropped to 2.1 per woman – the “threshold for zero growth”.
“The problems associated with population change come with the extremes – very rapid growth, or a very low fertility rate,” Prof Wilmoth said. “This means you invert the age pyramid increasingly quickly, and these demographic trends are much more difficult to adapt to.
“The more gradual change in India may be advantageous in the long run, as it gives you more time to adapt to a shifting age distribution. But of course, population trends are only one component of what makes for successful development,” he added.
The latest report, published by the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs on Monday, predicts that the world will hit a population of eight billion on November 15, before jumping to 8.5bn in 2030 and 9.7bn by 2050. During the 2080s, the number of people globally is expected to hit a peak of 10.4bn.
But the overall population growth rate has dropped to the slowest pace since 1950, having fallen below one per cent as birth rates continue to plummet. Women had on average 2.3 children over their lifetime in 2021, compared to around five in 1950.
‘Retirement age should increase’
Prof Wilmoth warned that countries need to urgently adapt to dramatically changing demographics , which will pose a raft of challenges as societies have to support increasingly elderly populations .
By 2050, there will be twice as many people over 65 as under five, while 61 countries are projected to see their population decrease by at least one per cent.
“One of the major issues in higher income countries is the retirement age,” Prof Wilmoth said. “As people live for longer and longer, I think there needs to be an expectation that they will work for longer as well. There needs to be a mechanism that guarantees that the official retirement age rises automatically as life expectancy goes up.”
Meanwhile, population growth is now centered in a handful of countries. Just e ight nations in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania – will be responsible for half of the global jump in population projected by 2050. Many of these are also bearing the brunt of climate change .
“Rapid population growth makes eradicating poverty, combating hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the coverage of health and education systems more difficult,” said Liu Zhenmin, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.
The latest projections also show that there was an “almost unprecedented” decline in life expectancy during the pandemic, from 72.8 in 2019 to 71 in 2021.
“There’s only one other disruption that is on a comparable scale since 1950: the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China around 1960,” said Prof Wilmoth. “It produced so many excess deaths in China, a country with a large population, that it had an impact on global life expectancy. That’s really the only other noticeable disruption to the trend.”
He added that, within the next five years, it is likely that life expectancy will rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the rollout of vaccinations curbs the Covid-19 death rate . – The Telegraph
