latest State of the World Population ReportAn official analysis by the United Nations has officially sealed what has been known for some time: that India will become the most populous country in the middle of 2023, surpassing China’s 1425 million by nearly 3 million. These estimates are based on official country statistics as well as excess birth, death rates and international migration trends. India has had a volatile relationship with the size of its population. In the ‘socialist’ era, the growing population was a convenient excuse to explain India’s poverty and the state’s inability to improve its standard of living. These seeds fueled ‘vasectomy’ programs that violently compromised dignity and freedom. Globalization and the opening up of the economy in the 1990s saw India as a vast, untapped market with ‘fortunes at the bottom of the pyramid’, which made the population an advantage. India’s large working-age population – or demographic dividend – compared to developed countries has provided labour-wage arbitrage and valuable economic opportunities. Indian numbers lag behind the skilled and unskilled labor force that forms a significant component of the workforce in West Asia and Africa, underground business process outsourcing projects from developed European countries and the United States, and university enrollments abroad.
This relative prosperity, however, has been unable to solve India’s crisis of economic inequality, however, and has busted the myth of forced sterilization and legal limits on family size being the key to population control. Despite overtaking China, India’s population growth is slowing down. The National Family Health Survey reported in 2021 that the total fertility rate had fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 for the first time. According to United Nations estimates, India’s population is projected to grow from its current 1.4 billion to 1.67 billion in 2050, before settling at 1.53 billion in 2100, with a peak of 1.7 billion in 2064. As the pendulum of opinion about population has swung from ‘disadvantage’ to ‘benefit’ in the national discourse, it is relevant to analyze this question in the light of recent developments. Earlier population debates ignored the climate crisis and the fact that many migrants, after years of skilled and unskilled labor abroad, were becoming permanent immigrants: more than 1.6 million Indians renounced citizenship since 2011. including 2,25,620 people in 2022, the highest during this period, the foreign minister told parliament in February. Economic opportunity, more than national pride, shapes the aspiration of the working population and in its absence, will naturally be of limited benefit to the declining population.