[Aditya]

India has overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation, according to UN data released Wednesday. India’s population surpassed 1.428 billion, slightly higher than China’s 1.425 billion people, news agency Bloomberg reported the UN’s World Population dashboard as saying.

Estimates by different agencies have suggested that India's population is expected to keep rising for nearly three decades before it peaks at 165 crore and then would start declining.

The burgeoning population will add urgency for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to create employment for the millions of people entering the workforce as the nation moves away from farm jobs. India, where half the population is under the age of 30, is set to be the world’s fastest-growing major economy in the coming years.

Half of India's population is under the age of 30, and some 12 or so million people enter the market every year looking for jobs. The challenge for India, which was estimated to grow 7% in the previous fiscal, is to sustain that pace of expansion in the coming decades or end up with even higher unemployment rates.

There also need to be jobs. That’s a long-standing deficiency for a top-heavy and at times gridlocked economy that must somehow produce 90 million new jobs before 2030, outside agriculture, to keep employment rates steady. Even in the years immediately before the pandemic, India was falling far short of that pace.

India’s population remains largely rural, unlike China’s. Even as both countries are seeing workers migrate to megacities seeking better prospects, the majority of India’s people will remain in the hinterland, while the bulk of China will increasingly be urban by 2035, according to estimates from UN-Habitat.

Source: Economic Times

[msdivy]

This is a projection, not the census.

It is general knowledge information. Not useful practically. Does it matter if we are 1, 2 or 10?