India’s population is predicted to have surpassed that of China, the most populous country in the world. India’s population will rise to 1.417 billion by the end of 2022.
According to estimates by the World Population Review, the number is about 5 million more than China’s growth. China’s population in 2022, at 1.412 billion, shrank for the first time in decades last year as its birth rate plummeted.
The National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s population decreased by 850,000 compared to the previous year. The tally only includes mainland China’s population, excluding Hong Kong and Macau and foreign residents.
In a press conference last Tuesday, the spokesperson for the counselor at the Chinese Embassy in India, Wang Xiaojian, spoke out.
“China and India both have large populations and rich labor resources. It is important for both countries to make wise use of the demographic bonus for development and rejuvenation and make greater contributions to the future of mankind,” he said, quoted from The Independent, Sunday (29/1/2023).
India’s population boom is urging the country to generate more jobs to ensure a young population growth can have a big impact on economic growth, especially those under 30 years old.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data for 2021, India’s working age population is more than 900 million. The United Nations predicted last year that the world’s population would reach 8 billion by November 15, 2023 and that India would overtake China as the world’s most populous country.
But that milestone appears to have been reached much earlier as India’s population already stood at 1.423 billion, as of January 18, according to WPR. India, which has not released any data, had scheduled its last census, in 2022, but was postponed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following India’s rapid economic growth before the COVID-19 pandemic and its post-pandemic recovery, India is poised to overtake Japan and Germany to become the world’s third largest economy, according to S&P Global and Morgan Stanley.
But ensuring that growth will be a challenge and India’s bloated population will become a liability if the country’s unemployment continues to grow.
According to 2021 data from the World Bank, India’s labor force participation, the number of active labor force and people looking for work, stands at 46 percent, the lowest in Asia. In the same year, China reached 68 percent.
“A lot of this growth is unemployment growth,” Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, told NDTV last year.
“Job is basically one job for the economy. We don’t need everyone to be a programmer or a software consultant, but we do need decent jobs,” he added.
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