The population of India, which is expected to remain the world’s largest throughout the current century, will likely decline by 12% after reaching its peak in the early 2060s at about 1.7 billion, the United Nations has said.
The World Population Prospects 2024 report, released here on Thursday, said that the world’s population is expected to continue growing over the coming 50-60 years, reaching a peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, up from 8.2 billion in 2024.
After peaking, the global population is projected to start declining gradually, falling to 10.2 billion people by the end of the century.
According to the report, India’s population in 2024 is projected at 1.45 billion and this will peak to 1.69 billion in 2054. After this, India’s population is projected to decline to 1.5 billion by the end of the century in 2100, but the country will still remain the most populous nation on Earth.
China’s population, which is projected to be 1.41 billion in 2024, will decline to 1.21 billion by 2054 before falling further to 633 million in 2100. Yet, it would continue to be the second most populous country after India.
The United States, which is currently ranked third most population country, will cede that place to Pakistan by 2054.
The UN report anticipated that China will likely experience the largest absolute population loss between 2024 and 2054 (204 million), followed by Japan and the Russian Federation (21 and 10 million, respectively).
Longer-range population projections are more uncertain. However, due to its large size and sustained low level of fertility, China is also likely to record the largest population decline of any country through the end of the century (786 million people).
By 2100, China is projected to have lost more than a half of its current population and to have returned to a population size comparable to that recorded in the late 1950s (50% probability)
By the late 2070s, the number of persons aged 65 years or older is projected to surpass the number of children (under age 18), while the number of persons at ages 80 and higher is projected to be larger than the number of infants (under age 1) already by the mid-2030s. Even in countries that are still growing rapidly and have relatively youthful populations, the number of persons aged 65 or older is expected to rise over the next 30 years.
Early pregnancies remain a challenge, particularly in low-income countries. In 2024, 4.7 million babies, or about 3.5% of the total worldwide, were born to mothers under age 18. Of these, some 340,000 were born to children under age 15, with serious consequences for the health and well-being of both the young mothers and their children.
The report finds that investing in the education of young people, especially girls, and increasing the ages of marriage and first childbearing in countries where these have an early onset will have positive outcomes for women’s health, educational attainment and labour force participation. These efforts will also contribute to slowing population growth and reducing the scale of the investments required to achieve sustainable development while ensuring that no one is left behind, UN report noted.