India is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by mid-2023, according to United Nations estimates released on Wednesday.
India’s population will rise to 1.4286 million compared to China’s 1.4257 million, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report on the state of world population. Thus, the country will have 2.9 million more inhabitants than its great Asian rival.
China’s population shrank last year for the first time in more than six decades, official data showed earlier this year. The UNFPA report also estimates that the world population will have reached 8.045 million by the same date.
India has no official data on the number of its inhabitants as it has not conducted a census since 2011. India’s census, which is conducted only once a decade, was supposed to take place in 2021 but had to be delayed due to the coronavirus . pandemic.
Logistical obstacles and political reluctance now prevent it from taking place, and this large-scale exercise is unlikely to take place anytime soon.
The Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been accused by critics of deliberately delaying the census so as not to release data on sensitive issues such as unemployment before next year’s national elections.
According to the Pew Research Center, an American think tank, the Indian population has increased by more than a billion people since 1950, the year from which the United Nations began establishing demographic data.
Source: BFM TV
