China still ahead of India in population count: experts

Indian demographers on Thursday refuted the contention that India has already dislodged China as the most populous country in the world.

Yi Fuxian, a China born scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, had made claims about the shrinking of Chinese population.

While it is for China to confirm or rebuff what Yi said, India is on track to stabilise its head count, the experts said.

Participating in a seminar at Peking University on Monday, Yi, an ardent critic of China’s population control measures, said Chinese authorities overestimated the number of births in China between 1990 and 2016. The number might have been 90 million less than what Beijing had officially estimated, he was quoted as saying by international media.

Yi argued that if this error is corrected, the population of China would come down to close to 1.29 billion, against the official figure of 1.37 billion released by the National Bureau of Statistics. This, he said, would be less than that of India, which is estimated to be over 1.3 billion currently.

“We are no one to talk about what exactly is the Chinese population count,” said Kameshwar Ojha, Additional Registrar General of India. The Chinese authorities challenged Yi’s data, arguing that the fertility rate in China is 1.7 children per woman, much higher than the 1.05 per cent he quoted.

SK Singh, professor of mathematical demography and statistics at the International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai, said “this is very unlikely”.

The fact that 67 per cent of women who have two girl children are not going for a third — hoping for a male child — is a clear indication that Indian population control policies are on the right track, he said.

COMMENT NOW