National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com Special Series: 7 Billion Population 7 Billion There will soon be seven billion people on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Can the planet take the strain? By Robert Kunzig Photograph by Randy Olson One day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been the long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer—“The Astronomer” and “The Geographer”—abruptly stopped what he was doing with his wife and rushed to his worktable. Cloth was Leeuwenhoek’s business but microscopy his passion. He’d had five children already by his first wife (though four had died in infancy), and fatherhood was not on his mind. “Before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” as he later wrote to the Royal Society of London, Leeuwenhoek was examining his perishable sample through a tiny magnifying glass. Its lens, no bigger than a small raindrop, magnified objects hundreds of times. Leeuwenhoek had made it himself; nobody else had one so powerful.

The learned men in London were still trying to verify Leeuwenhoek’s earlier claims that unseen “animalcules” lived by the millions in a single drop of lake water and even in French wine. Now he had something more delicate to report: Human semen contained animalcules too. “Sometimes more than a thousand,” he wrote, “in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.” Pressing the glass to his eye like a jeweler, Leeuwenhoek watched his own animalcules swim about, lashing their long tails. One imagines sunlight falling through leaded windows on a face lost in contemplation, as in the Vermeers. One feels for his wife. Leeuwenhoek became a bit obsessed after that. Though his tiny peephole gave him privileged access to a never-before-seen microscopic universe, he spent an enormous amount of time looking at spermatozoa, as they’re now called. Oddly enough, it was the milt he squeezed from a cod one day that inspired him to estimate, almost casually, just how many people might live on Earth. Nobody then really had any idea; there were few censuses.

Leeuwenhoek started with an estimate that around a million people lived in Holland. Using maps and a little spherical geometry, he calculated that the inhabited land area of the planet was 13,385 times as large as Holland. It was hard to imagine the whole planet being as densely peopled as Holland, which seemed crowded even then. Thus, Leeuwenhoek concluded triumphantly, there couldn’t be more than 13.385 billion people on Earth—a small number indeed compared with the 150 billion sperm cells of a single codfish! This cheerful little calculation, writes population biologist Joel Cohen in his book How Many People Can the Earth Support?, may have been the first attempt to give a quantitative answer to a question that has become far more pressing now than it was in the 17th century. Most answers these days are far from cheerful. Historians now estimate that in Leeuwenhoek’s day there were only half a billion or so humans on Earth. After rising very slowly for millennia, the number was just starting to take off. A century and a half later, when another scientist reported the discovery of human egg cells, the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion.

A century after that, around 1930, it had doubled again to two billion. The acceleration since then has been astounding. Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us. ( Pictures: Population 7 Billion. ) And the explosion, though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their childbearing years—1.8 billion—that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least, even though each woman is having fewer children than she would have had a generation ago. By 2050 the total number could reach 10.5 billion, or it could stop at eight billion—the difference is about one child per woman. UN demographers consider the middle road their best estimate: They now project that the population may reach nine billion before 2050—in 2045.

The eventual tally will depend on the choices individual couples make when they engage in that most intimate of human acts, the one Leeuwenhoek interrupted so carelessly for the sake of science. With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing. Close to a billion people go hungry each day. Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries. There will be billions more people wanting and deserving to boost themselves out of poverty. If they follow the path blazed by wealthy countries—clearing forests, burning coal and oil, freely scattering fertilizers and pesticides—they too will be stepping hard on the planet’s natural resources. How exactly is this going to work? THERE MAY BE SOME COMFORT in knowing that people have long been alarmed about population. From the beginning, says French demographer Hervé Le Bras, demography has been steeped in talk of the apocalypse.

Some of the field’s founding papers were written just a few years after Leeuwenhoek’s discovery by Sir William Petty, a founder of the Royal Society. He estimated that world population would double six times by the Last Judgment, which was expected in about 2,000 years. At that point it would exceed 20 billion people—more, Petty thought, than the planet could feed. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures, there must be wars, and great slaughter, &c.,” he wrote. As religious forecasts of the world’s end receded, Le Bras argues, population growth itself provided an ersatz mechanism of apocalypse. “It crystallized the ancient fear, and perhaps the ancient hope, of the end of days,” he writes. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist, enunciated his general law of population: that it necessarily grows faster than the food supply, until war, disease, and famine arrive to reduce the number of people. As it turned out, the last plagues great enough to put a dent in global population had already happened when Malthus wrote.

World population hasn’t fallen, historians think, since the Black Death of the 14th century. In the two centuries after Malthus declared that population couldn’t continue to soar, that’s exactly what it did. The process started in what we now call the developed countries, which were then still developing. The spread of New World crops like corn and the potato, along with the discovery of chemical fertilizers, helped banish starvation in Europe. Growing cities remained cesspools of disease at first, but from the mid-19th century on, sewers began to channel human waste away from drinking water, which was then filtered and chlorinated; that dramatically reduced the spread of cholera and typhus. Moreover in 1798, the same year that Malthus published his dyspeptic tract, his compatriot Edward Jenner described a vaccine for smallpox—the first and most important in a series of vaccines and antibiotics that, along with better nutrition and sanitation, would double life expectancy in the industrializing countries, from 35 years to 77 today.

It would take a cranky person to see that trend as gloomy: “The development of medical science was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” wrote Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968. Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, made him the most famous of modern Malthusians. In the 1970s, Ehrlich predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and it was too late to do anything about it. “The cancer of population growth … must be cut out,” Ehrlich wrote, “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” The very future of the United States was at risk. In spite or perhaps because of such language, the book was a best seller, as Malthus’s had been. And this time too the bomb proved a dud. The green revolution—a combination of high-yield seeds, irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers that enabled grain production to double—was already under way. Today many people are undernourished, but mass starvation is rare. Ehrlich was right, though, that population would surge as medical science spared many lives.

After World War II the developing countries got a sudden transfusion of preventive care, with the help of institutions like the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Penicillin, the smallpox vaccine, DDT (which, though later controversial, saved millions from dying of malaria)—all arrived at once. In India life expectancy went from 38 years in 1952 to 64 today; in China, from 41 to 73. Millions of people in developing countries who would have died in childhood survived to have children themselves. That’s why the population explosion spread around the planet: because a great many people were saved from dying. And because, for a time, women kept giving birth at a high rate. In 18th-century Europe or early 20th-century Asia, when the average woman had six children, she was doing what it took to replace herself and her mate, because most of those children never reached adulthood. When child mortality declines, couples eventually have fewer children—but that transition usually takes a generation at the very least. Today in developed countries, an average of 2.1 births per woman would maintain a steady population; in the developing world, “replacement fertility” is somewhat higher.

In the time it takes for the birthrate to settle into that new balance with the death rate, population explodes. Demographers call this evolution the demographic transition. All countries go through it in their own time. It’s a hallmark of human progress: In a country that has completed the transition, people have wrested from nature at least some control over death and birth. The global population explosion is an inevitable side effect, a huge one that some people are not sure our civilization can survive. But the growth rate was actually at its peak just as Ehrlich was sounding his alarm. By the early 1970s, fertility rates around the world had begun dropping faster than anyone had anticipated. Since then, the population growth rate has fallen by more than 40 percent. THE FERTILITY DECLINE that is now sweeping the planet started at different times in different countries. France was one of the first. By the early 18th century, noblewomen at the French court were knowing carnal pleasures without bearing more than two children. They often relied on the same method Leeuwenhoek used for his studies: withdrawal, or coitus interruptus.

Village parish records show the trend had spread to the peasantry by the late 18th century; by the end of the 19th, fertility in France had fallen to three children per woman—without the help of modern contraceptives. The key innovation was conceptual, not contraceptive, says Gilles Pison of the National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris. Until the Enlightenment, “the number of children you had, it was God who decided. People couldn’t fathom that it might be up to them.” Other countries in the West eventually followed France’s lead. By the onset of World War II, fertility had fallen close to the replacement level in parts of Europe and the U.S. Then, after the surprising blip known as the baby boom, came the bust, again catching demographers off guard. They assumed some instinct would lead women to keep having enough children to ensure the survival of the species. Instead, in country after developed country, the fertility rate fell below replacement level. In the late 1990s in Europe it fell to 1.4. “The evidence I’m familiar with, which is anecdotal, is that women couldn’t care less about replacing the species,” Joel Cohen says.

The end of a baby boom can have two big economic effects on a country. The first is the “demographic dividend”—a blissful few decades when the boomers swell the labor force and the number of young and old dependents is relatively small, and there is thus a lot of money for other things. Then the second effect kicks in: The boomers start to retire. What had been considered the enduring demographic order is revealed to be a party that has to end. The sharpening American debate over Social Security and last year’s strikes in France over increasing the retirement age are responses to a problem that exists throughout the developed world: how to support an aging population. “In 2050 will there be enough people working to pay for pensions?” asks Frans Willekens, director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. “The answer is no.” In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there.

Though its population continues to grow, China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women, who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having around 1.5. In Iran, with the support of the Islamic regime, fertility has fallen more than 70 percent since the early ’80s. In Catholic and democratic Brazil, women have reduced their fertility rate by half over the same quarter century. “We still don’t understand why fertility has gone down so fast in so many societies, so many cultures and religions. It’s just mind-boggling,” says Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN Population Division. “At this moment, much as I want to say there’s still a problem of high fertility rates, it’s only about 16 percent of the world population, mostly in Africa,” says Zlotnik. South of the Sahara, fertility is still five children per woman; in Niger it is seven.

But then, 17 of the countries in the region still have life expectancies of 50 or less; they have just begun the demographic transition. In most of the world, however, family size has shrunk dramatically. The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,” Zlotnik says. The bad news is that 2030 is two decades away and that the largest generation of adolescents in history will then be entering their childbearing years. Even if each of those women has only two children, population will coast upward under its own momentum for another quarter century. Is a train wreck in the offing, or will people then be able to live humanely and in a way that doesn’t destroy their environment? One thing is certain: Close to one in six of them will live in India. I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people.

People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. —Paul Ehrlich In 1966, when Ehrlich took that taxi ride, there were around half a billion Indians. There are 1.2 billion now. Delhi’s population has increased even faster, to around 22 million, as people have flooded in from small towns and villages and crowded into sprawling shantytowns. Early last June in the stinking hot city, the summer monsoon had not yet arrived to wash the dust from the innumerable construction sites, which only added to the dust that blows in from the deserts of Rajasthan. On the new divided highways that funnel people into the unplanned city, oxcarts were heading the wrong way in the fast lane. Families of four cruised on motorbikes, the women’s scarves flapping like vivid pennants, toddlers dangling from their arms.

Families of a dozen or more sardined themselves into buzzing, bumblebee-colored auto rickshaws designed for two passengers. In the stalled traffic, amputees and wasted little children cried for alms. Delhi today is boomingly different from the city Ehrlich visited, and it is also very much the same. UN: India to be world's most populous country by 2028 - BBC News BBC News UN: India to be world's most populous country by 2028 14 June 2013 Close share panel Image caption India's population is forecast to continue to grow until 2050, according to the United Nations India looks set to overtake China as the world's most populous country from 2028, according to the United Nations. At that point, both nations will number 1.45 billion people. Subsequently India's population will continue to grow until the middle of the century, while China's slowly declines. The UN also estimates that the current global population of 7.2 billion will reach 9.6 billion by 2050. That is a faster rate of growth than previously estimated.

The population growth will be mainly in developing countries, particularly in Africa, the UN says. The world's 49 least developed countries are projected to double in size from around 900 million people in 2013 to 1.8 billion in 2050, whereas the population of developed regions will remain largely unchanged. The UN said the reason for the increase in its projection is largely new information on fertility levels in certain high birth rate countries. Nigerian growth Large developing countries, such as China, India and Brazil, have seen a rapid fall in the average number of children per woman, but in other nations, such as Nigeria, Niger, Ethiopia and Uganda, fertility levels remain high. Nigeria's population is expected to exceed that of the US by the middle of the century, and could start to rival China's by 2100. China's population is expected to start decreasing after 2030. "Although population growth has slowed for the world as a whole, this report reminds us that some developing countries, especially in Africa, are still growing rapidly," commented Wu Hongbo, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.

The United Nations publishes an assessment of past, current and future population trends every two years, in a recurrent series known as the World Population Prospects . Researchers have used data for 233 countries and areas to produce Friday's report. Coming Soon: China's Demographic Doomsday | The National Interest Coming Soon: China's Demographic Doomsday While India will soon enjoy something akin to "ideal demographics." How did this happen? Tweet Share Share By 2022—and probably sooner—India will overtake China to become the world’s most populous state, a status the latter has held for at least three centuries and perhaps for all recorded history. And once the Chinese nation loses its demographic crown, it will fall fast. The country’s population will peak in 2028 according to the UN’s “ World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision ,” released at the end of July. China in its peak year will have 1.42 billion people. By the end of the century, the country will be just a smidgen over a billion—and very, very gray. India, on the other hand, has a bright demographic future.

No country will contribute more to global population growth between now and 2050. And the Indian state will continue to grow well into the second half of the century. India, according to the UN, will peak in 2068, when it will be home to 1.75 billion souls. That year, China is projected to have 541 million fewer people. China will also be behind where it counts, workers. India’s workforce—people aged 15 to 59—will overtake China’s within a decade. By mid-century, there will be 1.05 billion Indians of working age, 375 million more than the Chinese in the same age group. Moreover, India’s demographic profile will be close to perfect. By 2050, its median age—the point where half the population is younger and half older—will be a youngish 37.3 versus China’s 49.6. Then, the percentage of people 65 and older will be 27.6 percent in China and only 13.7 percent in India.

The subcontinent is in a demographic “sweet spot,” the term Credit Suisse’s Robert Prior-Wandesforde used in comments to CNBC, when he pointed out that “India has close to ideal demographics.” China, on the other hand, is experiencing accelerating demographic decline. Case in point: the crossover time of 2022 is six years earlier than the previous UN estimate. That previous estimate was issued just two years ago. Because UN numbers are derived from figures the nations themselves supply, the trends could be even worse for China than the world body suggests. Beijing’s figures, not surprisingly, tend to mask its decline. For example, the 2015 Revision, as noted, predicts China will peak in 2028. That’s unlikely, however. The high point will, in all probability, be closer to 2026, as the U.S. Census Bureau estimated a half decade ago, or 2025, as leading Chinese demographer Li Jianxin predicted. It could even be as early as 2020. That’s the year senior Chinese official Liu Mingkang, speaking at the Asia Global Dialogue in May 2012, admitted growth will end.

Changes in the workforce show similar fast erosion. The number of working age Chinese peaked in 2011 according to the official National Bureau of Statistics. As recently as the end of last decade, Beijing was predicting the highpoint would not be reached until 2016. China’s now-intractable demographic troubles are the inevitable result of two contradictory population policies. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, had an expansive vision, wanting as many Chinese in the world as possible. His pro-growth policies resulted in a total fertility rate—generally, the number of births per woman—of 5.9 in the early 1970s. The high-fertility, of course, was unsustainable, and toward the end of Mao’s rule Beijing adopted the mostly voluntary wan, xi, shao—“late, long, few”—program to limit runaway growth. The program halved the birth rate in less than a decade, but that was not enough for the next Chinese leader. Deng Xiaoping rolled out the one-child policy, termed the world’s most draconian social experiment, in 1979 and 1980 as one of his first initiatives after assuming power.

Chinese leaders now congratulate themselves for this “policy,” which they credit for preventing 400 million births, yet Beijing has progressively relaxed one-child rules in recent years. For one thing, it’s clear the obsessively enforced program created demographic abnormalities, a horrendous gender imbalance and the almost complete disappearance of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Another problem has been the policy’s adverse economic effect. China prospered during its so-called “reform era”—the decades following the Communist Party’s historic Third Plenum of 1978—largely because the country was propelled by the “demographic dividend,” the enormous bulge in the workforce caused by Mao’s and Deng’s population policies. The dividend has already been pocketed, and a shrinking workforce will be wrenching for China for the rest of this century and beyond. The declining number of workers does not ensure a contracting economy, but it means Chinese leaders will have to succeed in spite of demography instead of being propelled by it. India, on the other hand, will have a different type of challenge. It is often said that New Delhi will have to provide for its population, but that’s the wrong way of looking at the situation.

In reality, all the Indian government need do is step out of the way of its ambitious, talented, and restless people, removing legal, institutional, bureaucratic, and social barriers that have impeded them since independence, in 1947. That’s what the charismatic Narendra Modi, a reformer when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, has set out to do since becoming prime minister in May 2014. In 7 Years, India’s Population To Overtake China’s | IndiaSpend Home » Cover Story » In 7 Years, India’s Population To Overtake China’s In 7 Years, India’s Population To Overtake China’s Darryl D’Monte, August 1, 2015 Follow @IndiaSpend Recipient Email Enter a Message I read this article and found it very interesting, thought it might be something for you.

The article is called In 7 Years, India’s Population To Overtake China’s and is located at Captcha 11339 India will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation by 2022, says a new UN report which revises its previous estimates , which put the date around 2028. In 2015, India had 1.311 billion people, according to the UN’s new estimates , against China’s 1.376 billion, a difference of 65 million people. India was earlier estimated to reach 1.35 billion by 2020, against China’s 1.43 billion. Only by 2028 was India estimated to have 1.454 billion, against 1.453 billion in China. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision & 2015 Revision (medium variant); figures in thousand.

The UN’s World Population Prospects: 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. It provides the demographic data and indicators to assess population trends at the global, regional and national levels and to calculate many other key indicators commonly used by the UN system. If the new projections hold good, India will also be–or continue to be–far more densely populated than China. India’s population density is already more than double that of China’s, which has 141 people per sq km against India’s 382 people per sq km. How the date moved from 2050 to 2022 India’s population ascendancy was first estimated to take place in 2050, then gradually lowered to 2040 and then 2030, said Prof Siva Raju, Chair of the Centre for Population, Health and Development at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

But the UN’s projections have changed, with China’s population growth rate decelerating much faster than India’s, which explains why India will top the world’s list in 2022. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (medium variant); figures in % The two giants, China and India, now have 19% and 18%, respectively, of the world’s population, states the UN report released on July 29. Five Asian countries–China, India, Indonesia Bangladesh and Pakistan–are among the 10 largest countries in the world. Two are in Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), one each in Africa (Nigeria), in Northern America (USA), and Europe (Russian Federation). The world now has 7.3 billion people. This is expected to rise to 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

The report reveals that between 2015 and 2050, half the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the US, Indonesia and Uganda. Previously, India was expected to surpass China by 2035, Dr Fauzdar Ram, Director of the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai told IndiaSpend. China’s fertility rates–the average number of children a woman can be expected to bear during her lifetime–has dropped much lower than India’s, which is why its population is growing less than India’s. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (medium variant); figures in no. of children born per woman Based on the UN’s latest assessment, the total fertility rate in China was estimated at 1.55 children per woman in 2010-2015, while that of India was estimated at 2.48, slightly under the world average, François Pelletier, Chief, Population Estimates and Projections Section, UN Population Division in New York, told IndiaSpend.

Overall, India had seen an appreciable decline in its fertility over the years–the fertility rate has fallen to 2.48 from 5.9 in 1951–though that process was faster in China, which had a fertility rate of 6.11 in 1951. India’s higher fertility contributed to the higher population growth. Lastly, the population growth of China in recent years was mainly due to “population momentum” (the population’s total fertility has fallen below the replacement level since the early 1990s) and this will also contribute to the population growth in India for the coming decades. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (medium variant); figures in no. of births per 1,000 people. Over the last decade, from 2001-2011, India’s population grew at only 1.64% per year, as against 1.96% in the previous decade. However, since the base was so large, the population increase was “significant”, amounting to around 18 million per decade or 2 million per year, Dr Ram said. Government’s estimates overwhelmed–or are they?

In May, Union Health Minister J P Nadda told the Rajya Sabha that India’s population would cross China’s by 2028. He cited the UN’s 2012 Revision. However, he defended the government’s population control measures, which lowered the decadal growth rate from 21.54% for 1991-2000 to 17.64% during 2001-11. Nadda cited the Sample Registration System to demonstrate how the total fertility rate also declined from 3.6 in 1991 to 2.3 in 2013. As many as 24 states and union territories had achieved the replacement total fertility rate of 2.1 or less, which ensures zero population growth. Some experts believe that the UN’s revised estimates are just projections, which may or may not materialise. India’s population will certainly overtake that of China’s, but the exact year could vary.

The revised estimates are a revision based on actual growth, which is different from the growth projected earlier, according to Sona Sharma, Joint Director, Advocacy & Communications of the Population Foundation of India, a Delhi-based non-governmental research group. India wasn’t growing faster than imagined; its decadal growth rate had declined, she observed. India’s bulge was also due to its huge population of young people in the reproductive age, which contributed to its population momentum. All the additional 3.7 billion people from now to 2100 will enlarge the population of developing countries, which is projected to rise from 5.9 billion in 2013 to 8.2 billion in 2050 and to 9.6 billion in 2100, the UN report said. It will mainly be distributed among the population aged 15-59 (1.6 billion) and 60 or over (1.99 billion), as the number of children under age 15 in developing countries will hardly increase. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (medium variant); figures in thousand. China’s was a hugely mixed story, Sharma believed.

It had developed at the grassroots since the 1970s by investing in education and health, unlike India. Its fertility rates began to decline even before the imposition of the one-child policy. Most in India would find this policy undemocratic in that it deprives a family of taking its own decisions about having more than one child. However, India’s family planning programme–one of the first and biggest in the world, when launched in the 1950s–suffered a setback during the forced sterilisation of women and men during the national emergency between 1975 and 1977, the 40th anniversary of which was observed in June. The real lesson lies in social progress–Kerala shows the way The real lesson of the discrepancy between China and India lay in the former’s better social progress indicators across all fronts, as the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Reports indicate year after year, said Sharma. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision , National Population Stabilisation Fund ; figures in no. of children born per woman.

Kerala and Sri Lanka have proved exceptions in that they reached the replacement level of 2.1 (children born to a woman) even before China. All the southern states, except Karnataka, are on the same path, as IndiaSpend previously reported . As we can see, the population in the southern states is stablising, even falling below replacement levels. It is the northern states, primarily, with their still-high fertility rates–although these have dropped–that continue to boost India’s population. The world’s population projections are important because they have been released at a time when the UN’s Millennium Goals, the deadline for which was this year, are being replaced this year by the much more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, all of which are measured by the population reached. ■ (D’Monte is Chairperson, Forum of Environmental Journalists of India.) Additional research by Saumya Tewari of IndiaSpend. “Liked this story? IndiaSpend.com is a non-profit, and we depend on readers like you to drive our public-interest journalism efforts.

Donate Rs 500; Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000.” World Population To Increase To 9.7B By 2050; India Will Overtake China As Most Populous Nation: New Study World Population To Increase To 9.7B By 2050; India Will Overtake China As Most Populous Nation: New Study 10/02/13 AT 10:36 AM Close The world’s population will climb to 9.7 billion in 2050, and India’s population is projected to overtake that of China, while some of the African countries with higher fertility rates will see their population doubling during the period, a new study said Wednesday. According to a bi-annual report by the French Institute of Demographic Studies, or Ined, the world population is expected to grow to 10 billion to 11 billion people by the end of the 21st century, from its current level of 7.1 billion.

The report authored by Gilles Pison, director of research at Ined, said that two Asian giants, China and India, will swap their current respective positions as the world’s most populous country and the second-most populous country, by 2050. [[nid:48126]] India’s population will rise to 1.6 billion by 2050, from its current level of 1.2 billion, while the Chinese population is projected to remain unchanged at its current level of 1.3 billion, during the period. Related Stories Africa, And The World, Getting More Crowded Even Faster The findings of the study are in line with the projections made by a U.N. study, released in June, which pegged the world population to reach 9.6 billion by 2050. According to the U.N. report, total population in developed nations will remain at around 1.3 billion from now until the middle of the century, but in 49 of the world's least-developed countries, the population is projected to double to 1.8 billion by 2050 from around 900 million in 2013.

According to Pison, Africa will see exponential growth in its population, and the continent is expected to be home to 2.5 billion people – a fourth of the total world population – by 2050, from its current population of about 1.1 billion. Pison attributed the population growth to a high fertility rate in Africa, which at 4.8 children per woman now, is almost twice the global average of 2.5 children per woman. According to the report, Nigeria, the most populous nations in Africa, is expected to have a population of 444 million, which will exceed the projected U.S. population of 400 million, by 2050. Meanwhile, the population in the Americas is expected to touch 1.2 billion, by the middle of the century from the current 4.3 billion, and Asia’s population is projected to breach the 5 billion mark in 2050, from its current level 4.3 billion, the report said.

10 projections for the global population in 2050 | Pew Research Center 10 projections for the global population in 2050 By Rakesh Kochhar 58 comments A new Pew Research Center report examines global public opinion on the challenges posed by aging populations and analyzes projections for the populations in the U.S. and in 22 other countries. Here are 10 major findings regarding the demographic future of the world’s population in 2050. 1 The global population is getting older: The number of people 65 and older is projected to triple by mid-century, from 531 million in 2010 to 1.5 billion in 2050. In the U.S., the population of seniors is expected to slightly more than double, from 41 to 86 million. 2 The world is graying faster than the U.S.: The global median age, eight years less than in the U.S. in 2010, is projected to be only five years less by 2050. 3 Who will be among the oldest?

By 2050, the majority of people in Japan, South Korea and Germany are expected to be older than 50. Some Latin American countries, which are now younger than the U.S., will likely be older than the U.S. by 2050. 4 Trading young for old: Most countries, including the U.S., are projected to see the share of their population that is 65 and older surpass the share that is younger than 15 by mid-century. 5 Pressure on workers: As populations age, working-age people in the developed world may have to support more dependents, while workers in India and several major African nations will likely have to support fewer dependents. 6 Population 2050: The global population is expected to increase by 38%, from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 9.6 billion in 2050. The population of children younger than 15 is projected to increase by only 10%, a consequence of falling birth rates. 7 How big will the U.S. be? The U.S. population is projected to grow by 89 million residents from 2010 to 2050.

The U.S. is likely to grow faster than European and East Asian countries, but slower than Nigeria, which is expected to replace the U.S. as the world’s third most populous country. 8 A population shift to Africa: Africa’s population is projected to increase the most and make up a greater share of the global population by 2050. The shares of Europe and Asia in the global population are expected to decrease, while the Americas will hold steady. 9 India replaces China as the world’s most populous country: India’s population is expected to increase by 400 million by 2050. Its projected population of 1.6 billion will be almost equal to the populations of the U.S. and China combined. China is projected to add only 25 million residents. 10 Population losers: The populations of Japan, Russia and Germany are expected to decrease by more than 10% by 2050. For Japan, this means a loss of 19 million residents; for Russia, 23 million; and for Germany, 10 million.

Question: What national population is projected (as at 2011) to overtake China in 2020 as the largest in the world?
Answer: India