India is set to overtake China to become the most populous country in the world by the middle of this year, data released by the United Nations shows.
India’s population is expected to reach 1.4286 billion – 2.9 million more than its neighbour on 1.4257 billion.
According to the latest projection from the United Nations, India should surpass China’s population midway through this year.
Demographers are unsure exactly when India will take the title as the most populous nation in the world because they’re relying on estimates to make their best guess. The latest projection from the United Nations this week put it at mid-year, though that remains an estimate.
China has had the most people in the world since at least 1950, the year United Nations population data began. Both China and India have more than 1.4 billion people, and combined they make up more than a 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 Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
“There is some uncertainty, not only about India’s population, but also China’s population.”
The U.N. said in a report Wednesday that India will have about 2.9 million people more than China sometime in the middle of this year — an estimated 1.4286 billion for India, 1.4257 billion for mainland China. But demographers have said the limits of population data make it impossible to calculate an exact date.
Mathematical calculations are made from data including a range of surveys, as well as birth and death records.
“It’s a crude approximation, a best guess,” said Patrick Gerland, chief of the population estimates and projections section at the U.N. in New York.
Not long ago, India wasn’t 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 U.N. 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 both India and China was July 2022, said Sara Hertog, a U.N. population affairs officer in New York.
The demographers then use a statistical technique to infer when India’s population has surpassed that of China, according to 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,” Gietel-Basten said. “But at least they are based on a relatively solid and consistent methodology.”
The foundations of both nations’ numbers are censuses, or head counts, conducted every decade.
China’s last census was in 2020. Demographers used birth and death records, along with other administrative data, to calculate how the population has grown since then.
China has an aging population with stagnant growth even after the government seven years ago retreated from a one-child policy, and just two years ago said couples could have three children.
India has a much younger population, a higher fertility rate and a decrease in infant mortality over the last three decades.
India has more babies born each year than in any other country, while China has joined many European countries in having more deaths each year than births, said Dudley Poston, Jr., an emeritus professor of sociology at Texas A&M University.
There’s more than bragging rights at stake over which nation is the world’s most populous — there are social and economic consequences. In India, that means a growing labor force and growth that sparks economic activity. In China, that means fewer working-age adults able to support an aging population.
