More babies are born in UP and Bihar than perhaps all of China | Number Theory

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According to the United Nation’s population projections, India replaced China as the most populous country in the world in mid-2022. While UN projections expect India’s population to peak in 2061, China’s has already peaked and 2025 was the fourth consecutive year of decline in its population according to their official data released on January 19. As is to be expected, the key driver of China’s declining population is falling births. If China’s official numbers and India’s official projections were to be compared, just Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together now have more births than all of China, even though the population of the two Indian states taken together is just 26% of China’s 1.41 billion. Here is what the numbers show.

Representational image. (Pixabay)

More babies are born in UP and Bihar than perhaps all of China

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  China had 7.91 million births in 2025, almost a million less than UN’s projections

  According to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), it recorded 7.91 million births in 2025. This is 1.62 million less than the 9.53 million births recorded in 2024 and 9% less than the 8.71 million projected by the United Nation’s latest biennial population projections, World Population Prospects (WPP) released in 2024. This lower-than-expected number notwithstanding, China is still likely to be the country with the second largest number of births in the world in 2025, the first being India.
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  A breakup of India’s births by state shows Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alone could have more births than China in 2025

  Accessing latest data for India is a problem, but one can work with what is available, namely, the 2023 Sample Registration System (SRS) estimates on estimated births and projected populations for states. Using the two together – Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and birth rates of 23.6 and 25.8 per thousand and projected populations of 236 million and 127 million respectively – one gets an estimated 5.58 million and 3.29 million births in 2023. The estimated 8.87 million births in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar would have been only marginally lower than China’s 9 million in 2023. While we do not have 2024 and 2025 SRS reports yet, it is unlikely that the number of births in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar would have fallen by a million which is what it would take for their total number of births to fall below China. What makes this comparison especially striking is the fact that China’s population is around 3.9 times that of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar put together. Simply put, birth rates in India are high enough for the population base to matter less. The lowest birth rate in a big state in India in 2023 – 12 per thousand in Tamil Nadu – was almost double the 6.4 rate in China in the same year. This birth rate gap is also seen in the first chart, which shows that estimated births in India in 2025 are almost three times that in China.
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  But births are falling in every major region except Africa

  China’s demographics always attract attention because they have been subject to far too many policy interventions from its government. China’s adoption of the one-child-policy in 1982 led to a sharp fall in birth rates and threw its demographic transition curve completely off its natural course. Now that it faces demographic decline, the Chinese state is trying hard to convince its people to have more children, but this is something where even rabid authoritarianism is less likely to succeed unlike the draconian measures during the worst years of the one-child-policy. Another fact which distinguishes China from other large countries, especially in the West, is its refusal to permit large-scale migration, which is a bigger driver of population growth in countries such as the US than the balance of births and deaths. This background notwithstanding, China is not alone when it comes to falling births in the world. In fact, the number of births is falling in every region of the world except Africa, where population is estimated to grow until the end of this century, when it will house 3.81 billion people compared to 633 million in China. This is true for India – where births peaked at 29.3 million in 2001 – but has yet to happen in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar despite falling birth rates and individual years of decline in births in absolute terms.