India is overtaking China in April as the world’s most populous country, the United Nations said confirming a major global demographic shift.
India’s population surpassed 1.4286 billion, slightly higher than China’s 1.4257 billion people, according to mid-2023 estimates by the UN’s World Population dashboard.
China’s shrinking population
It is the first time since 1950 that China has been knocked off the top spot. The shift was reported as China’s population began declining in 2022 for the first time in more than 60 years. China’s population drop follows decades of strict laws to bring the country’s booming birthrate under control, including the introduction of a one-child policy in the 1980s.
Population boom in India
In India, the population has grown by more than a billion since 1950. Today on average 86,000 babies are born a day in India compared with just 49,400 in China.
One third of India’s predicted population boost over the next decade will come from just two states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh which already has a population of about 235 million, bigger than Brazil.
India’s population forecast is an estimate by UN agencies since there has been no census in the country since 2011. The last census was canceled because of COVID and has now been postponed to 2024.
China and India remain the two most populous countries of the world, both with more than 1 billion people, each representing nearly 18 percent of the world’s population. The United States is third on the list with an estimated population of 340 million as of the end of June, the UN data showed.
The world’s population reached 8 billion people on November 15, 2022.
World in 2050
According to the United Nations estimates:
- The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion persons in the next 30 years, from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050
- More than half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to occur in Africa.
- The populations of 61 countries or areas in the world are expected to decrease by 2050, of which several are in Europe.
- Globally, life expectancy at birth is expected to rise from 72.8 years in 2019 to 77.2 years in 2050.
The world population is projected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030 and to increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion by 2100.