The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: India has overtaken China in terms of total population, according to the World Population Review (WPR). This was widely expected to happen as per United Nations (UN) projections as well.
India had last conducted a census in 2011. The census is the largest and most authentic exercise to measure population. Since this decadal exercise has not been announced yet, one would have to wait for official numbers to come in.
The WPR database suggests that Indian population on March 3 stood at 1.428 billion against China’s 1.425 billion. The United States comes third with 339 million people.
While India attaining, arguably, the status of the highest populated country in the world may sound like a story to be worried about, data also indicates that India has achieved ‘replacement level’ total fertility rate (TFR). TFR is the number of children born to a woman in her reproductive age.
According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), the TFR for India stood at 2.0. According to the UN, if TFR of 2.1 is “sustained over a sufficiently long period, each generation will exactly replace itself in the absence of migration.” In fact, India’s TFR now stands at what UN terms below replacement fertility.
“In countries experiencing below-replacement fertility (lower than 2.1 children per women), population ageing accelerates and the fact that a generation does not produce enough children to replace itself eventually leads to outright reductions in population,” the UN adds. China’s TFR was 1.5, incidentally, in 2021 and the country’s population started declining, in absolute numbers, from this year.
According to Our World in Data, an Oxford University database, India’s population will start reducing by 2066. Using UN projection, Our World in Data states India will attain a population of 1.7 billion by 2060 and it would reduce to 1.69 billion by 2067. Till the end of this century, India would remain the most populous country with 1.53 billion people and China will have 766 million people.
While India may count among its advantages that it is not home to one of the most ageing populations of the world, the demographic dividend might not remain an advantage.
“We have long known, however, that the nations of South Asia will be unable to take full advantage of this demographic opportunity because they haven’t prepared their populations for the task. Indicators for the health and education of the workforce are too low,” Mihir Sharma, an economist, wrote for Bloomberg in January this year.
Also read: India’s Population Will Be 1.52 Billion by 2036, With 70% of Increase in Urban Areas
In his piece, he underlined that the UN and the Chinese government had expected a decline in the country’s population not before 2030, but it started happening by early 2020 itself. India’s population is currently expected to decline by 2060. However, if China’s trajectory is an indicator, then India’s population may also start declining much sooner than when it is expected to – and that may bring its own unexpected set of challenges.
He also wrote that while current TFR for India stands at 2.0, this national reality may actually mask inter-state differences – something that is also evident from the NFHS-5 data and which the Pew research also highlighted. The TFR was 2.98 in Bihar and 2.91 in Meghalaya to as low as 1.05 in Sikkim and 1.3 in Goa. This clearly indicates that not only population growth – and also reduction rates might be different from one state to another – it also calls for more state-centric policymaking to face the demographic shift that India might experience in the decades to come.