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India is set to surpass China as the world’s most populous country by 2027, according to recent United Nations projections. The country now has 1.37 billion people — second only to China’s 1.4 billion — and is expected to add another 230 million by 2050, many of whom will be among the world’s poorest.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have had those facts in mind earlier this year when he called on Indians to have small families. Yet those alarming statistics hide a more complex reality, and some positive trends, experts say.
As in much of the rest of the world, India’s growth rate has been slowing for the past few decades, a decline attributed to increasing alleviation of poverty; rising education levels, especially among women; and growing urbanization. Most Indian states are expected to hit replacement fertility levels of 2.1 children per woman by 2021. Fertility rate has already declined to an average of 2.2 in 2017, according to a government survey of 22 major states, while urban fertility has already fallen below replacement level, to 1.7 children per woman. (The replacement fertility level refers to the number of children born per woman so that one generation exactly replaces the preceding one.)
Still, nine of those states have fertility rates above replacement levels, including five of the poorest. And experts say that India still has a large unmet need for modern contraceptive methods and relies too heavily on sterilizing women. The United Nations estimates that more than 10 million Indian women a year have unintended pregnancies.
According to current estimates, India’s population will peak in the early 2060s at 1.7 billion, putting additional pressure on the environment and natural resources and boosting greenhouse gas emissions —though the average Indian generates a fraction of the planet-warming emissions produced by the average American or European. Most of India’s population increase by mid-century will be due to demographic momentum, meaning that even as fertility rates fall below replacement levels, the large numbers of young people will continue to boost the country’s population, says P. Arokiasamy, head of the Department of Development Studies at the Indian Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai.
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