India is set to become world's most populous nation in this month

India's 2011 census put the country's population at 1.21 billion, meaning the country has added 210 million, or almost the number of people in Brazil, to its population in 12 years.

India has managed to control its population growth with the total national fertility rate falling a touch below the replacement level of 2.0, according to official data for 2019-21. But within the country, there are wide disparities in the fertility rate, reflecting the mixed successes of decades-old population control programmes.

The population explosion is posing its challenges with a massive and young workforce in the years to come expected to migrate to urban areas within their own and other states, leading to rapid and large-scale increases in urban population. Providing these migrants access to basic amenities, health and social services in urban areas could also prove to be a challenge for policy planners.

China's population dropped by roughly 850,000 to 1.41175 billion at the end of 2022, the country's National Bureau of Statistics said. The drop is the biggest since China's Great Famine of 1961. Last year's birth rate was 6.77 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 7.52 births in 2021 and marking the lowest birth rate on record.

China also logged its highest death rate since 1974, registering 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people compared with a rate of 7.18 deaths in 2021.

Long-term, UN experts see China's population shrinking by 109 million by 2050, more than triple the decline of their previous forecast in 2019. That's caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases to take care of a rapidly ageing population.

Much of the demographic downturn is the result of China's one-child policy that it imposed between 1980 and 2015 as well as sky-high education costs that have put many Chinese off having more than one child or even having any at all. China's stringent zero-Covid policies that were in place for three years have caused further damage to the country's bleak demographic outlook, population experts have said.

Although local governments have since 2021 rolled out measures to encourage people to have more babies, including tax deductions, longer maternity leave and housing subsidies, the steps are not expected to arrest the long-term trend. Online searches for baby strollers on China's Baidu search engine dropped 17% in 2022 and are down 41% since 2018, while searches for baby bottles are down more than a third since 2018. In contrast, searches for elderly care homes surged eight-fold last year.

The reverse is playing out in India, where Google Trends shows a 15% year-on-year increase in searches for baby bottles in 2022, while searches for cribs rose almost five-fold.

Reuters