India set to overtake China as world’s most populous country by mid-2023: UN report

India is poised to overtake China as the world's most populous country by mid-year with nearly three million more people, UN estimates showed on Wednesday. India's population will be 1.4286 billion compared to China's 1.4257 billion at mid-year, the UN Population Fund's World Population Status Report showed.

China's population shrank last year for the first time since the 1960s, when millions starved to death as a result of former leader Mao Zedong's disastrous agricultural policies. Many blame the slowdown on the rising cost of living as well as increasing numbers of women leaving the workforce to seek higher education.

Beijing ended its strict "one-child policy", introduced in the 1980s due to concerns about overpopulation, in 2016 and began allowing couples to have three children in 2021. China is facing a looming demographic decline as the birth rate declines and its workforce ages. Several regions have also announced plans to increase birth rates - but official efforts have so far failed to reverse the decline.

India has no recent official data on how many people it has because it has not conducted a census since 2011. India's once-a-decade census was supposed to take place in 2021, but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is now bogged down by logistical obstacles and political reluctance, making it unlikely that a massive exercise will begin anytime soon. Critics say the government is deliberately delaying the census to hide data on contentious issues such as unemployment before national elections next year.

India's economy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is struggling to provide jobs for the millions of young people who enter the job market every year. Half of the Asian giant's population is under 30 years old.

The country also faces huge challenges in providing electricity, food and housing for its growing population, with many of its huge cities already struggling to cope.

According to the Pew Research Center, India's population has grown by more than one billion people since 1950, the year the United Nations began collecting population data. A new UN report also estimates that the world population will reach 8.045 billion by mid-2023. Other countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, can expect demographic decline in the coming decades, according to other UN data released last July, which predicts how the world's population will evolve by 2100.

A different picture is emerging in Africa, where the population is expected to grow from 1.4 to 3.9 billion by 2100, with about 38 percent of the Earth's population living there, up from about 18 percent today. Eight nations with more than 10 million people, most of them in Europe, have seen their populations decline in the past decade.

Japan, which lost more than three million inhabitants between 2011 and 2021, is also experiencing a decline due to an aging population. The population of the entire planet is not expected to decline until the 1990s, after peaking at 10.4 billion, according to the United Nations.