India will have more people than China by 2022

United Nations: India will surpass China to become the most populous nation in the world by 2022, six years sooner than previously forecast, and the country is projected to retain the top spot till 2100, the UN has said.

And with the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth over the next 35 years.

Romania is one of the 48 countries projected to experience population declines, most of which are Eastern European countries.

The demographic forecasts are crucial for designing and implementing the new global development goals being launched later this year to replace the Millennium Development Goals. After 2022, when both are expected to have about 1.4 billion, India’s population will continue rising and China’s will “remain fairly constant” until the 2030s, at which point it will begin to “slightly decrease”.

Within seven years, the population of India is expected to surpass that of China.

India now has a population just over 1.31 billion people, with China’s sitting at 1.38 billion.

If the new projections hold good, India will also be – or continue to be – far more densely populated than China.

“Future population growth is highly dependent on the path of future fertility, as relatively small changes in fertility can, projected over decades, generate large differences in total population”.

The 2015 Revision builds on previous data by incorporating additional results from the 2010 survey of national population censuses, as well as findings from recent specialised demographic and health surveys from around the world.

“Of these, Nigeria’s population, now the seventh largest in the world, is growing the most rapidly”, said the report.

He said that 10 African countries which include Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia are projected to increase their population’s five-fold or more by 2100.

At the moment, more than 60 per cent Indians are in the economically productive age group of 15-59.

Nations in Africa will be home to almost half of the global rise in population over the coming decades.

He said that the report indicated that declining fertility and rising life expectancy mean the world was getting greyer. Much of the coming growth will be attributed to reducing child mortality and raising life expectancy.