E-Paper
Elon Musk reacts to India becoming world's most populous nation; ‘… is destiny’
Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Saturday responded to a post in which India was ranked first in terms of population.
According to recent United Nations projections, India will overtake China as the world's most populous country on July 1, when its population would reach 1.429 billion. While this has sparked alarm from a various quarters, Twitter chief executive Elon Musk believes that the country's demographics will instead determine how it evolves in the future.
"Demographics is destiny," Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday in response to a tweet that ranked countries based on population estimates, with India at the top of the list.
The billionaire has long advocated for increased birth rates to fight ageing populations. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he tweeted in August.
Elon Musk even has a solution to the problem of resource scarcity. He aspires to colonise Mars and develop a human civilization there.
India's young population
India's population has a median age of 28.2 years. The average Chinese person is 39 years old, hence the average Indian is ten years younger than the average Chinese person. India will have a large labour pool for many years to come, which is frequently mentioned as a possible positive for the country's future economic growth.
However, in order to fully reap the benefits of the demographic dividend, robust government measures are required. As Amartya Sen argued in his famous book Development as Freedom: "The success of the demographic dividend depends on investments in education, health, and social infrastructure that enable young people to participate fully in the modern economy."
