We’re now at 8.02 billion and it’s climbing higher by the second.
How did we get to 8 billion people?
This is not surprising.
Premchand Dommaraju studies and analyzes changes to populations to find current trends and
predict future ones.
What’s important for us is that the rate that it is growing has declined over the years.
It might take longer to add the next billion.
This is a map of the population density in the world.
Zoom in a little bit more and you see there are parts are thicker than others.
What we’re looking at here is the concentration of people is very high in some parts of Asia,
as compared to North America or other parts.
India’s population is expected to continue growing and to peak at 1.7 billion in 2064.
This issue has become a great cause of concern, particularly in China.
By the end of the century, if the trends continue, we’ll have the Chinese population go below 1 billion.
Many Chinese scholars believe that the ageing population is going to be a big problem for
the Chinese economy, negatively impacting its innovation and entrepreneurship capability.
India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world
and is poised to become a key player on the global stage.
In 2022, it overtook the United Kingdom to become the world's fifth largest economy,
with its Gross Domestic Product exceeding $3 trillion.
Will India’s massive population give its economy an edge?
Or will it be a setback to its growth?
In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people.
China had the largest share, with more than 550 million people.￼
Fast forward to 2023, India is estimated to have overtaken China as the world's most populous nation,
with more than 1.4 billion people in each country.
That’s 36% of the world’s population residing in just these two giants.
India’s population is relatively young compared to the rest of the world, with 40% under the age of 25.
The median age in India is about 28 years old, unlike in the U.S. and China, where the
median age is 38 and 39 respectively.
So, what does this mean for India?
1 in 5 people working in the world will be from India.
That has an enormous opportunity and a responsibility because we need to ensure that all of the
people involved get the right skills.
Alok Kshirsagar is the co-author of a report that charts a roadmap for India’s future.
In the last 20 years, a lot of software and IT services and operations services were delivered
from India to the world.
Over the next 10 years, you will see innovation in other areas.
You can have older people that might be in the U.S. or Europe or Japan, that are being
enabled and supported through remote healthcare delivery in India.
Same is true in education, on advanced analytics.
So, if you now have sensors, for example, on wind turbines or industrial equipment around the world,
the actual analytics and control towers and monitoring of that can be done
from India.
The impact of India’s population boom will extend beyond services to include goods
bearing the “Made in India” label too, says Antara Ghosal Singh, an analyst researching
policies in India and China.
India has emerged as a key destination for low-value industries leaving China, particularly
mobile phone manufacturers, the supply chains of global brands like Samsung, Apple, Oppo,
Vivo, Xiaomi, Lenovo.
Apple, in particular, plans to move parts of its manufacturing process out of China,
and India is set to be one of the beneficiaries of that shift.
According to the country’s commerce and industry minister, Apple hopes to manufacture
25% of all its iPhones in India, up from around 5% currently.
India is also home to the world's biggest mobile phone factory, set up by South Korean
tech giant Samsung.
As India’s manufacturing base expands, so too have its exports.
As of 2022, the country has inked 13 regional free trade agreements, which will ensure greater
market access for its domestic goods while promoting exports.
The south Asian nation hopes to ship out around half a trillion worth of goods in 2023, and
quadruple its exports to $2 trillion by 2030.
It is feared India might use its population advantage to take away a lot of OEM businesses
from China, which is of course, not very good news for the Chinese economy, which is already
showing signs of slowing down.
For the first time since 1961, China’s population growth is falling.
By 2050, China’s population is expected to be 8% smaller than what it is now.
Various Chinese researchers point out that at the current pace, India’s labour force
can easily exceed the 1-billion mark in the next few years, while that is almost impossible
for China to do.
Researchers believe that China will lose millions of its working-age population in the foreseeable future.
The pace of China’s greying population is expected to overtake Japan,
which has the highest senior population ratio in the world.
There are also many ways that China is attempting to compensate for the population problem
that it is presently facing, through supportive government policies, improving the labour productivity,
transforming human resources into human capital.
The problem extends to China’s fertility rate too.
And even though the average number of children borne to an Indian woman has been falling,
it is still more than high income and upper-middle income countries.
But challenges remain.
There are many factors that still restrict India from reaping the demographic dividend.
You have low efficiency of a democratic setup, you have social tension, you have corruption,
backward infrastructure, low labour participation.
While a world with 8 billion people indicates remarkable progress in medicine and healthcare,
there are major concerns about the sustainability of rapid population growth.
Extreme poverty, which is defined as living on less than $2.15 per day, affects 8% of
the global population.
While reforms by the Indian government at the turn of the 21st century have reduced
poverty levels in the country, some 10% of Indians survived on less than $2.15 in 2019.
If you look at India’s history, India always had potential, India always had possibilities,
but it always missed the bus.
It’s more important to improve the lives of those vast majority of people who are presently
underprivileged.
India’s objective, as been highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is to become
a developed nation by 2047, to get more integrated with the global system.
The economic output per Indian citizen in 2021 was around $2,300, which is below the
average for lower middle-income countries.
India’s growth story is very lopsided in the economic sense.
It’s leading to greater inequality, because obviously a lot of people can make money,
but a lot of people are written out of the growth story so that’s a big challenge.
It's very important that we are able to use technology to distribute manufacturing services
into smaller towns and smaller cities, and not as dependent on the large cities to drive growth.
If you are a young person in the north or northeast of the country, you can be doing
new services without having to leave the town in which you operate.
There may not be formal jobs in the sense of people going to 9-6 jobs in a big company,
B=but I do see a lot happening in smaller towns with respect to agriculture, education, logistics,
transport, food, small consumer goods.
I think that’s going to be a huge driver of income growth.
What is one thing that you hope, as a demographer, would improve?
We took away some of the reproductive rights that people have.
So, those are the things that we should not be doing.
We should allow people to exercise their choices, whether they want to have children or not.
I wanted to go back to our previous ticker.
From the start to the end of our conversation, the population has increased by 3,500 people.
I feel very optimistic and happy for all the children that are being born. Welcome to the world.
Welcome to the world, children.