On the threshold of 1.5 billion. Will India take the title of the world's most populous country?

India will overtake China to become the world's most populous country by the middle of this year, the culmination of trends that began decades ago, according to a United Nations forecast released on Wednesday.

Observers expect the South Asian country to maintain this position for centuries, describing this as a historic change, as China has been the most populous country since the fall of the Roman Empire in 453 AD.

How did it happen?

China moved decisively to curb its population growth in the 1980s, imposing a one-child policy that was sometimes harshly enforced on its people.

It has become more prosperous in recent decades, a phenomenon that has been consistently linked to the downsizing of families, but the country is now facing a demographic dilemma: an aging and declining population, which prompted Beijing to roll back its one-child policy seven years ago.

Although India has also launched family planning campaigns, they were unpopular for targeting men in the 1970s.

The campaigns are currently focused on women, as female sterilization has become the most popular contraceptive method of all time, despite the associated health risks.

But India's fertility rates are consistently higher than those of its northern neighbor, so its population is much younger, and now even older than China's, with nearly 650 million Indians under the age of 25.

What are the implications of the shift?

China and India, which make up more than a third of the world's population, are competing for geopolitical influence, and a shift in the "most populous" title would cement India's position as a rising power being courted by the West at Beijing's expense.

It would also support New Delhi's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

In addition to exceeding China's population, India's population is larger than the combined population of the other four veto-wielding nations on the Security Council.

While meeting the needs of such a large population poses major environmental and economic challenges, having a large and young labor force also brings economic benefits. India is the world's fastest-growing major economic power, and last year replaced former colonial power Britain as the fifth fastest-growing country in global GDP rankings.

According to the latest World Bank data, the size of India's economy is around $3.17 trillion, compared to $3.13 trillion for the UK.

What numbers are available?

The United Nations estimates that India's population will reach 1.429 billion by July 1, 3 million more than China's 1.426 billion, but calculating the actual numbers for such gigantic countries is tricky.

China's National Bureau of Statistics releases a population figure every year, and reported in January that the mainland had a population of 1.412 billion at the end of 2022.

It was the first population decline since the catastrophe that resulted from Chinese leader Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" policy in the early 1960s.

India has not released an official census since the last one in 2011, when it recorded 1.21 billion people.

The Mystery of India's Population

Birth certificates only became compulsory in India by 1969, and a census scheduled for 2021 was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic before being disrupted by logistical difficulties.

The census is a gigantic operation, involving an army of specialized personnel who go door-to-door to collect data, including religion, mother tongue, education level and more.

Opponents accuse the Indian authorities of shirking the census in order to avoid raising controversial issues such as unemployment rates ahead of next year's elections.

What does New Delhi say?

The BJP government usually seeks to tout the country's achievements, but seemed unusually reticent about the possibility of wresting the title of the world's most populous country from China.

The health ministry on Wednesday did not comment on the figures published by the United Nations, and several official population clocks that have been displayed in public places in India in recent years have been hidden.

In an Independence Day speech last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi kept referring to India as a country of 1.3 billion people, a threshold that experts say was crossed several years ago.

Source: Agencies