According to UN estimates, India has overtaken China to become the world’s most populous country, the online edition of The Guardian reported.
According to the world body, this is the most significant change since records began.
According to UN calculations, based on a number of factors, including census data and death and birth rates, India’s population is now 1,425,775,850, making it the first time the South Asian country has more people than China.
This is the first time that China has lost the top spot since the United Nations began recording the world’s population in 1950.
The history of China’s population decline is that for decades they tried to limit the number of births with strict laws.
In the beginning, the laws effectively kept the population under control, but the strict regulation became a victim of its own success, and today the country is dealing with serious problems caused by a rapidly aging society.
One of the problems is that, as families were traditionally happy with boys, single-handedness led to an extraordinary decrease in the number of girls: currently, there are about 32 million more men than women in the country, Mei Fong Pulitzer wrote in her book One Child, about the effects of population control. award-winning journalist.
Recent measures to encourage women to have more children in China have had little success, with the population projected to decline by almost 10 percent over the next two decades, and the country’s population to fall below one billion before the end of the century.
India’s population, meanwhile, has grown by more than a billion since 1950. Although at a decreasing rate, growth is expected to continue and by 2064 the number of inhabitants will reach 1.7 billion. Currently, an average of 86,000 babies are born in the country every day, compared to only 49,400 in China.
The exact number of India’s population is unknown because the census was canceled due to the pandemic and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not yet announced when it will resume.
MTI
