India, China play down big demographic news Opinion by Financial Times

The Financial Times newspaper has published an article arguing that New Delhi and Beijing give little weight to long-projected population crossover. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Demographic milestones rarely get more momentous than this: India is almost certainly now the world’s most populous nation, having overtaken its neighbour and geopolitical rival China.

Last week the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) confirmed that the long-projected population crossover between the two Asian countries would happen by mid-year. It projected that India would have more than 1.428bn people, about 3mn more than China. 

This week another UN body, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, put a finer point on the data: it said it believed the inflection point had probably happened some time in April, adding that it might revise that estimate later because of gaps in information — including what it could glean from India, which has not held a census since 2011. 

While the UN’s announcements made headlines around the world, including in India and China, reaction from their governments has been remarkably subdued. 

Analysts say that population is a politically sensitive issue for both countries, and that each had reasons to play down the big crossover point domestically. 

The day the UNFPA published its report, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said pointedly that “population dividends don’t only depend on quantity but also on quality”, a reference to China’s strong economic growth and development record compared with rivals, including poorer India. 

His Indian counterpart, Arindam Bagchi, declined to offer any response to the UN’s report, and told a news briefing: “To be honest, I didn’t realise there was a competition on this issue.” 

In India, with a chequered history of family planning efforts that in recent years has brought birth rates down, the growing population is usually framed as a problem in public policy debates, and only rarely as an opportunity. For some Hindu nationalists, birth rates among minority Muslims are a fixation.

Amitabh Kant, India’s sherpa for the G20 group of large economies, was one of the few Indian officials to put a positive spin on the UN’s announcements, declaring that India might now leverage its “phenomenal demographic dividend”. 

Writing in the Times of India newspaper, Kant said: “This will position India as a powerhouse of human capital and the largest producer of human resources in the world.” 

The government officials’ remarks came after the UN painted a picture of starkly diverging demographic fortunes for the two countries: it said that while India’s population would keep growing for several decades, China’s would continue to fall and possibly drop to less than 1bn by the end of the century, with more people retiring and fewer young people entering the workforce in decades to come.

“The narrative of China’s economy slowing down due to the structural constraint of a shrinking population is not welcome to a country which still hopes to grow fast enough to achieve ‘rejuvenation’ by 2049, and to catch up with the US even before that,” said Shyam Saran, a former Indian foreign secretary and president of the India International Centre, a think-tank.

India’s reaction to the turning point had been “ambivalent”, Saran added, because positive sentiment about the demographic dividend was being “balanced by an awareness that we still do not have what it takes to enjoy the dividend while it lasts”, including by creating enough jobs for its young people.

For some Indians, other countries’ responses to the UN’s announcements reminded them of old stereotypes and clichés about their “overpopulated” country. 

Under the caption “Population: India overtakes China”, Germany’s Der Spiegel published a cartoon showing Indians cheering and waving a flag aboard an antiquated train packed with people, as it overtook a Chinese bullet train with just two people inside. The drawing was widely denounced as racist and offensive in India, including by IT minister of state Rajeev Chandrasekhar(opens a new window), who reminded the magazine that “in a few years India’s economy will be bigger than Germany’s”. 

The UN’s population announcement also fed into resentments and recriminations on India’s deeply polarised political scene. Jairam Ramesh, communications chief for the opposition Indian National Congress, pointed out that India’s southern states, with their “pioneering” family planning efforts, were set to lose parliamentary seats in a population-weighted reallocation expected in coming years that is likely to hurt opposition parties, whose stronghold is the south. 

Amid the mostly negative spin around the big demographic moment, one leading demographer urged Indians to embrace their achievements in bringing the country’s population under control.

“The government’s silence over this matter is baffling because the government has invested a lot in the healthcare, family planning and other factors that contribute to having a stable population,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “India should be proud that unlike China, it has reached replacement-level fertility without using any coercive measures.”