The UN has spent a few months dizzying the international media while circling the exact moment when India would give the demographic sorpasso to China. The only sure thing is that this would happen in 2023. Even the dethroned Chinese accepted the maxim. But it has been impossible for the UN agencies, which have been drawing projections separately these months, to coordinate to mark a date on the calendar. This has led to confusion in the press, with newspapers and televisions publishing, when it suited them best, the headline that India was already the most populous country.

The problem is basic: no one really knows how many people live in India. The vast nation in question has not conducted a census since 2011. The one that had to be done in 2021, was delayed with the excuse of the pandemic. And they are not even updated, beyond 2019, the estimates that usually publish from the Government of the nationalist Narendra Modi. Even the internal forecasts of the Indian institutes have been making these months the competition to the UN to see who tangled more with the data.

In the midst of all these gaps, the majority opinion of international demographers, many UN analysts and the technicians who have been providing the Indian government in recent years with annual sample surveys, is that all this chaos does not obscure the historical fact: India is already surely the most populous country on the planet.

This last week of April, as announced by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the South Asian nation will end up touching the 1,426 million inhabitants. That figure was already reached by China last year, but since then its population has not stopped falling, unlike the neighbor with which it shares a long and disputed border in the Himalayas.

The U.N. Population Fund said last week that India would have about three million more people by mid-year than China, which had held the throne since U.N. population records began in 1950. Although most demographers agree that China has been the most densely populated country in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire.

More than 8,000 million people

In 1955, there were 2.800 billion people on Earth. Today, that is the population that only the two Asian giants add, which also represent more than a third of the world's population, which exceeded the barrier of 8,000 million at the end of last year.

The Indian census has continued to grow, quadrupling in just over half a century, while China faces a historic demographic recession. Last year, for the first time since 1960, the number of deaths in the world's second power exceeded the number of births. Dragged down by the one-child policy (extinct since 2016, you can now have three) and with the considerable increase in living costs, the fertility rate in China has fallen to just 1.2 children. But in India, with two births on average per mother, that chart has also been slowing from the nearly six average births in the 1960s.

"India experienced rapid population growth, almost 2% annually, for much of the second half of the last century. Over time, death rates fell and life expectancy increased, adding more than a billion people since independence in 1947, and its population is expected to grow for another 40 years," said demographer Tim Dyson of the London School of Economics. "Rising incomes and improved access to health and education have helped Indian women have fewer children than before, effectively flattening the growth curve."

A growth that, as happened in China, in the new most populous country in the world is quite uneven. In India, which is about one-third the size of its giant Asian neighbor in terms of land area, most residents are clustered in northern states. Fertility rates vary drastically if you look at one side of the map or the other.

In the wealthier and more advanced south, in addition to providing women with greater access to contraceptives and family planning services, they have better educational resources, more job opportunities and a higher social status, which pushes families to be smaller but more prosperous.

Two examples provided by the most recent National Family Health Survey, from 2021: in Tamil Nadu, in the south, 84% of women, who average 1.8 children, are literate, compared to 55% in the northern state of Bihan, where women average three children.

In India, many fear that this new positioning as the most populous country could eventually exceed its resources in a land where extreme inequality remains the great hindrance: poverty, exacerbated by food inflation, extends especially in the north, and ethnic tensions, enhanced by a government increasingly cornered towards Hindu nationalism. They grow between regions so disparate that they balance differently in the face of the demographic boom.

The trend for the future is that these contrasts will continue to be based on India having a very young population: one in five people under the age of 25 in the world was born in this South Asian country. The average age of the Indian population is 28, while China's is 10 years older. Just looking at babies (up to four years old), India boasts around 113 million, twice as many as China and more than the entire combined population of Spain and Italy.

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