Demographers are unsure exactly when India will take the title as the most populous nation in the world because they are relying on estimates to make their best guess.
However, they know it is going to happen soon, if it has not occurred by now.
China has had the most people in the world since at least 1950, the year that UN population data began.
Photo: AP
China and India have more than 1.4 billion people each, and combined they make up more than one-third of the world’s 8 billion people.
“Actually, there is no way we can know exactly when India will surpass China,” said Bruno Schoumaker, a demographer at Universite catholique de Louvain in Belgium. “There is some uncertainty, not only about India’s population, but also China’s population.”
Mathematical calculations from a range of surveys, as well as birth and death records, project that India will overtake China sometime in the middle of this month, but demographers warn that it should be taken with a grain of salt as the numbers are fuzzy and could be revised.
“It’s a crude approximation, a best guess,” said Patrick Gerland, chief of the population estimates and projections section at the UN in New York.
Not long ago, India was not expected to become most populous until later this decade, but the timing has been sped up by a drop in China’s fertility rate, with families having fewer children.
Demographers at the UN Population Division make estimates based on projections from a wide variety of data sources to get what they believe are the most up-to-date demographic numbers.
The last update to the data used for these calculations for India and China was July last year, said Sara Hertog, a UN population affairs officer in New York.
The demographers use a statistical technique to infer when India’s population has surpassed that of China, said Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi.
“The reality, of course, is that these estimates are just that, but at least they are based on a relatively solid and consistent methodology,” Gietel-Basten said.
The foundations of both nations’ numbers are censuses conducted every decade.
China’s most recent census was in 2020. Demographers used birth and death records, along with other administrative data, to calculate how the population has grown since then.
India’s most recent census was in 2011.
Its scheduled 2021 census was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andrea Wojnar, the UN Population Fund’s representative for India, said that the agency is confident in the survey’s numbers “because it uses a very robust methodology.”
China has an aging population with stagnant growth even after Beijing seven years ago retreated from a one-child policy, while India has a much younger population, a higher fertility rate and a decrease in infant mortality over the past three decades.
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