By 2028, India to get past China as most populous country

India would pip China as the world’s most populated country in the world by 2028, says a United Nations population report released on Thursday. It would also have one of the worst sex ratios, the report said. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 14, 2013, 09:26:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India would pip China as the world’s most populated country in the world by 2028, says a United Nations population report released on Thursday. It would also have one of the worst sex ratios, the report said.

The report based on new fertility data says that India’s population would increase till 2050, and then decline to be around 1.54 billion by the turn of the century. China would enter the downturn in population from 2025 onwards and would lose its top spot to India in 2028.

The elderly would be the reason for India’s rising population with the fertility rate per woman expected to fall below 2 in 2050 to 1.84 by 2100. It would result in the proportion of the children below the age of 14 to fall by about 10 percentage points between 2013 and 2050.

The population will still rise as life expectancy would increase from 64.9 years in 2013 to 80.6 years in 2100 and would be just one percentage point below the global average.

Now, it is four percentage points less than the world average of 67.1 years, the report says. The average age would also increase from 26.4 years in 2013 to 44.3 years by the end of the century hinting India will start losing its demographic dividend after 2025.

The report also shows that India has the worst sex ratio, behind only the Middle East. Presently, India has 107 men for every 100 women, a ratio worse than Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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