![]() It was due in 2021, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the government, led by prime minister Narendra Modi, has yet to announce the date it will commence. ![]() The exact size of India’s population is still not known, due to a delay in the government carrying out the census, which usually takes place every decade. So I don’t think there’s any need for alarm.” “But at the same time, we have also reduced our population growth and reached population stabilisation faster than we had imagined and it will continue to slow down as long as we stay on the right track. “Earlier projections said we would overtake China in 2027 so it’s happened four years faster, mostly because of our young population,” said Muttreja. Poonam Muttreja, executive director of Population Foundation of India, said that while some were concerned at the implications of being the world’s most populous country, she said that India’s population growth was no longer facing the “explosion” many had feared. Today on average 86,000 babies are born a day in India compared with just 49,400 in China. Though growth has now slowed, the number of people in the country is still expected to continue to rise for the next few decades, hitting its peak of 1.7 billion by 2064. In India, the population has grown by more than a billion since 1950. According to projections, the size of the Chinese population could drop below 1 billion before the end of the century.Ĭhina’s ageing population is an obstacle to economic development, with the number of working age people in the country declining by 38 million in the last three years. Women still have only 1.2 children and the population is expected to fall by almost 10% in the next two decades. Recent policies introduced in China trying to incentivise women to have more children have done little to stimulate population growth. ![]() “How can the country now shore up birth rates, with millions of missing women?” asks Mei Fong, the author of One Child, a book about the impact of the policy. Men now outnumber women by about 32 million. Part of the problem is that because of a traditional preference for boys, the one-child policy led to a massive gender imbalance. While initially highly effective in controlling the population, these policies became a victim of their own success, and the country is now grappling with an ageing population in steep decline, which could have severe economic implications. This included fines for having extra children, forced abortions and sterilisations. China’s population decline follows decades of strict laws to bring the country’s booming birthrate under control, including the introduction of a one-child policy in the 1980s.
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