Global population growth has been less than 1% since 2020
Photo: iStock Some 70 years after India became the first country in the world to have a national family planning programme, its population figure made headlines. India will surpass China to become the most populated country in the world by July this year, going by the State of World Population 2023 report, published by the United Nations Population Fund in April.
India has also the highest working-age population in the world and the highest proportion of such population among countries — a working-age population of 1.1 billion which is 75 per cent of the total population. Overall, the world population has reached the eight billion mark and is expected to grow for decades.
Discussions over population rise predictably have two strands. One, high population rise will add pressure on finite natural resources thus depleting them beyond sustainable levels and also add to the climate crisis by resulting in more global warming-causing emissions.
However, there are no definitive studies or evidence to show rising population has breached the planet’s carrying capacity on giving services. For instance, nearly 69 per cent of the 8 billion populations with $10 or less a day earning hardly consume to add on to the emissions. Anyway, half of the global emissions are attributed to 10 per cent of the world’s richest.
Second, for some countries the rise in young population is a demographic dividend, while in countries with low population growth the rise of the ageing population means an unsustainable future scenario. Mostly developing and poor countries like India are enjoying the demography dividend, while the developed countries have crossed that phase as depopulation has set in.
This time also the debates followed these predictable lines. But, the UN report has not flagged off population rise as a concern. Rather, it has seriously warned of sliding population growth and ageing societies that will make our societies unsustainable.
More to it, the report said that population rise is being used as an excuse to not fix many problems that humans have caused to make the planet unliveable. “Many real challenges are waved away with a simple, nihilistic verdict: if global catastrophes are the result of too many people, the logical assumption that follows is that the number of people must be reduced, that some unknown number of people should survive and reproduce while others should not,” noted the report.
Looking at the demography data, the population rise threat is more of a myth now. Global population growth has been less than 1 per cent since 2020. Across the world, fertility is declining. Two-thirds of the world population live in countries that have a below total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1, or the zero-growth fertility rate. The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman by the time she ends childbearing. Below-replacement fertility — 2.1, or two children per woman — is defined as a combination of fertility and mortality levels that leads to a negative population growth rate, hence a declining population size.
By 2050, the UN projection shows, only eight countries — the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania — will account for 50 per cent of the population growth. Such is the depopulation in high-income countries that the World Population Prospects report of 2022 said, “Over the next few decades, migration will be the sole driver of population growth in high-income countries, as the number of deaths will progressively exceed the number of births.”
In India, government data shows that 23 states and Union territories had TFRs below replacement level. The Economic Survey 2018-19 said that India’s population growth rate will decline faster than assumed. “India is set to witness a sharp slowdown in population growth in the next two decades,” analysed the Economic Survey. “Some states will start transitioning to an ageing society by the 2030s,” it highlighted.
The UN report also, for the first time, alerted us to the unthinkable consequence of the population decline. “If this (population decline) continues, whole countries or even the human population itself could collapse,” said the report.
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