However, the story of India’s population explosion is really two stories. In the north, led by only two states, the population is still growing. In the wealthier south, numbers are stabilizing and in some areas declining. The deepening divisions between these regions mean that the government must ultimately deal with a unique problem: the consequences of a baby boom and an aging population, all within one nation. India is currently home to more than 1.39 billion people – four times that of the US and more than 20 times the UK – while 1.41 billion live in China. But with 86,000 babies born in India every day and 49,400 in China, India is set to take the lead in 2023 and hit 1.65 billion people by 2060. Q&A

Over 8 billion

projection As the world’s population passes another milestone, our Beyond 8 billion series examines the impact on some of the countries projected to see the most growth, as well as those facing the opposite problem: falling birthrates and rapidly aging populations. Thanks for your response. On November 15, the world population will reach a total of 8 billion people. Between now and 2050, more than half of the world’s projected population growth will occur in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania, and India. The growth will put enormous pressure on India’s resources, economic stability and society, and the effects will reach far beyond its borders. As a country on the front lines of the climate crisis, already experiencing extreme weather 80% of the year, dwindling resources like water could become a defining factor in what India’s future population will look like. India expected to overtake China – chart

One country, two stories

Fears of a “population explosion” in India – where growth collapses under the weight of an uncontrollably expanding population and the country’s resources are overstretched, leaving millions to starve – have abounded for a century. After independence, India’s population grew at a significant rate. between 1947 and 1997, from 350 million to 1 billion. But since the 1980s, various initiatives have worked to convince families, particularly those from poorer and marginalized backgrounds that tend to have the most children, of the benefits of family planning. As a result, India’s fertility rate began to fall faster than any of the doomsday “bang” scenarios had predicted. A small family is now the norm in India, and with an annual population growth rate of less than 1%, fears of population collapse are no longer considered realistic. In the 1950s, a woman in India gave birth to more than six children on average. Today the national average is just over two and still falling. However, restrictions on population growth were not uniform across India, and India’s entrenched north-south divide played a major role in demographics, with ongoing social and political consequences. For the next decade, one-third of India’s population growth will come from just two northern states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Bihar, the only state in India where women still typically have more than three children, is not expected to hit population stability – 2.1 children per woman – until 2039. Kerala, its most educated, progressive state of India, reached this number in 1998. Map of population growth in India In Bihar’s poverty-stricken Kishanganj district, which has one of the highest fertility rates in India, women said they only recently started learning about the benefits of having fewer children. The urge to have sons, still considered far more desirable than daughters in parts of India, remained a key motivation for women in the village. Surta Devi, 36, said she had six children to ensure she would have two sons to “carry on our lineage”. “It was only after I gave birth to all my children that doctors told me about family planning,” Devi said. Phullo Devi, 55, an illiterate laborer who had six children before opting for sterilization, said she wished she had done things differently. “If I had fewer children, I could raise them better and I could educate them,” he said. But Devi said things were slowly changing in the village. “Now health workers are doing house-to-house campaigns and making people aware about contraception and condoms. I definitely want my sons and daughters to have fewer children so they don’t have to live in poverty,” she said. An Indian woman and the husband of a migrant worker hold her baby as she boards a bus Photo: Harish Tyagi/EPA

The “youth bulge”

A particular demographic challenge, widespread across India but particularly concentrated in poorer northern states, is that of the ‘youth bulge’. The median age of an Indian is 29 and the country is struggling with a huge, ambitious and increasingly restless young population, the majority of whom are unskilled and for whom there are not enough schools, universities, training programs and above all not enough jobs. Across India, youth unemployment is 23% and only one in four graduates is employed. While female literacy is increasing, only 25% of women in India participate in the workforce. In Uttar Pradesh, where the median age is 20, there are over 3.4 million unemployed youth. Earlier this year, riots broke out in Bihar after more than twelve million people applied for 35,000 posts in the Indian Railways. Vishu Yadav, 25, from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district, has a master’s degree, a diploma in education and passed the teachers’ eligibility test, but is unemployed, with jobs scarce and over a million people applying for officer posts in the state Public Service . “It’s a depressing, hopeless situation. I am eligible to become a professor but I cannot secure a position. There are too many young people with qualifications and not enough jobs,” he said. Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, said there is still time for this young population to work for India’s benefit. “India has a fantastic window of opportunity, but it will only be there for about the next two decades,” Muttreja said. “We have the capacity to harness the potential of the youth population, but we need to invest in adolescent education, health and sexual health immediately if we are to reap the benefits. “Otherwise, our demographic dividend could turn into a demographic disaster.” Muttreja said India’s youth risked fueling population growth unless contraceptive and family planning services improved, describing the situation as “woefully inadequate”. Female sterilization is still the most widely used method of contraception in India, and it is mostly done by older married women. Of India’s tiny health budget, only 6% is allocated to family planning and only 0.4% of that is invested in temporary methods such as the contraceptive pill or condoms. “We currently have nearly 360 million young people, the majority of whom are of reproductive age, and this number is only going to increase in the coming decades,” Muttreja said. “The need for more temporary methods of contraception is urgent. It will be very problematic if this need is not met.” According to the UN, there are 10 million unwanted pregnancies in India every year. Abortion is legal in India, but it was only legalized for unmarried women this year. It remains taboo for married women, and most abortions are performed by village “cuckoos”, often with long-term health consequences. However, for several states in the south that now have declining populations, another challenge lurks on the horizon, rarely mentioned. In the next 15 years, the average man from the southern state of Tamil Nadu will be 12 years older than someone from Bihar. Tamil Nadu residents will be an average of 12 years older than those from Bihar in the next 15 years Photo: Idrees Mohammed/EPA “The crisis that the south will soon face is that of an aging population,” said Aparajita Chattopadhyay, a professor at the International Institute of Population Sciences. “India will soon have over 10% of its aging population, which in our context is a huge number. This presents significant problems in terms of employment, social security but above all for health care, where costs are still very low and the prevalence of diseases such as diabetes is very high among the elderly. This should not be ignored.”

A political problem

The North-South divide has also allowed for the politicization of the population in India. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by a hardline figure from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the high population was used to justify drafting a population control bill, proposing coercive methods to ensure two children per couple . The draft bill is seen by some as a thinly veiled attack on Muslims, fueled by a pervasive but inaccurate myth promoted by Hindu nationalists that Muslims are rapidly outnumbering Hindus as part of a Muslim conspiracy to become the majority in India . Muslims constitute 14% of the population, Hindus 80%. “All this talk of population control measures in Uttar Pradesh is only to continue the controversy and give Muslims a bad name, incite hatred and win over the Hindu majority,” said SY Quraishi, a former Indian civil servant who recently published The Population Myth, a book that debunks the myths surrounding Islam and family planning in India. “As the data clearly shows, this suggestion of Muslims outnumbering the Hindu population is a blatant lie.” Quraishi pointed out that while Muslims in India have higher fertility rates…