联合国：明年4月，印度将超中国成为人口第一大国
India is forecast to surpass China as the world's most populous country by mid-April next year, a United Nations report said.
India saw rapid population growth — almost 2 percent annually — for much of the second half of the last century. The UN projects that India's population will be 1.64 billion by 2050.
Yet India is not undergoing a population explosion. India's fertility rate has also fallen substantially in recent decades - from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to two births per woman today - but the rate of decline has been slower.
According to BBC, one in five people below 25 years in the world is from India and 47 percent of Indians are below the age of 25. "This generation of young Indians will be the largest consumer and labor source in the knowledge and network goods economy. Indians will be the largest pool of global talent," says Shruti Rajagopalan, an economist, in a new paper.
It could, for example, strengthen India's claim of getting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. "I think you have certain claims on things (by being the country with largest population)," says John Wilmoth, director of the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
India needs to create enough jobs for its young working age population to reap a demographic dividend. But only 40 percent of of India's working-age population works or wants to work, according to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
More women would need jobs as they spend less time in their working age giving birth and looking after children. The picture here is bleaker: only 10 percent of working-age women were participating in the labor force in October, according to CMIE, compared with 69 percent in China.
Then there's migration. Some 200 million Indians have migrated within the country — between states and districts — and their numbers are bound to grow. Most are workers who leave villages for cities to find work. "Can our cities provide migrants a reasonable living standard? Otherwise, we will end up with more slums and disease," says S. Irudaya Rajan, a migration expert at Kerala's Center for Development Studies.
Demographers say India also needs to stop child marriages, prevent early marriages and properly register births and deaths. A skewed sex ratio at birth — meaning more boys are born than girls — remains a worry.
Demographers say the ageing of India receives little attention. In 1947, India's median age was 21. A paltry 5 percent of people were above the age of 60. Today, the median age is over 28, and more than 10 percent of Indians are over 60 years. "As the working-age population declines, supporting an older population will become a growing burden on the government's resources," says Rukmini S, author of Whole Numbers and Half Truths. "Family structures will have to be recast and elderly persons living alone will become an increasing source of concern," she says.
推 荐 阅 读
微信扫码关注该文公众号作者
戳这里提交新闻线索和高质量文章给我们。
来源: qq
点击查看作者最近其他文章