: How India’s Record-Breaking Population Will Shape the World #WorldNEWS On New Year’s Day in 2021, nearly 67,000 babies were born across India—the highest number of births given anywhere

How India’s Record-Breaking Population Will Shape the World #WorldNEWS
On New Year’s Day in 2021, nearly 67,000 babies were born across India—the highest number of births given anywhere in the world that day, according to UNICEF. The record-breaking number also contributed to India’s latest achievement: becoming the world’s most populous country.
On Tuesday, experts raised the possibility that India’s 1. 417 billion people may have surpassed China’s population numbers according to the latest estimates from the World Population Review. The news came after China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s total population declined by 850,000 between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022.

The development marks a new phase in India’s growth on the global stage, riddled with the challenges of managing a rising population, but also an opportunity to “reimagine strategies and build on our successes to provide a healthy and happy life for its people,” Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India (PFI), told TIME.
Read More: China’s Shrinking Population: How It Happened and What It Means
What’s behind India’s growing population?
The biggest factor behind India’s massive population is its young people: 650 million Indians—nearly half the country’s population—are below the age of 25. And experts estimate that India won’t hit its population peak until 2065, which means that even if the younger demographic produces only one or two children per couple, the population size will continue to increase over time before it stabilizes, driving what PFI calls the “population momentum. ”
India’s historic lack of family-planning services also means that many Indian women aren’t able to have smaller families. Although India was the first country to adopt family planning as an official policy in 1952, a period of economic and social stagnation led former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to suspend all civil liberties during The Emergency in 1975. A mass drive to sterilize men compulsorily was also launched, which became so unpopular as a population control method that for the next two decades, subsequent governments didn’t broach the topic of family planning at all. Instead, population control methods have focused on women: between 2013 and 2014, India carried out the majority of nearly 4 million sterilizations on women, according to government statistics. Until 2017, India’s public healthcare system also didn’t offer many contraceptive choices to men or women, something which Muttreja believes needs to change.
“We must empower our women to be able to decide if, when, and how many children to have,” she said.