While India is overtaking China as the world’s most populous country, according to the UN’s World Population Dashboard, UN Population Fund’s (UNFPA) data shows India will have a population of 1.4286 billion by the middle of this year, while the People Republic of China (PRC) will have 1.4257 billion.
However, India’s infrastructure, supporting legal systems, education and other parameters cannot match its population growth, meaning that India still lacks the bridges or the preconditions to achieve its demographic dividend, Chinese experts said.
According to some experts, meeting the demand of the tens of millions of new workers each year was a huge challenge for the Indian government to address.
The unemployment among young people could easily result in a labile factor in the society. Whether India can truly reap the demographic dividend lies in the future economic and social development path and mode.
According to Ru Cui who is senior Journalist and working as Bureau Chief of China Media Group in Pakistan, the PRC has had the most people in the world since at least 1950, the year UN population data began. Both the PRC and India have more than 1.4 billion people, and together they make up more than a third of the world’s 8 billion people.
The demographic dividend of a country depends on the quantity of population, but the quality of population is more important; it depends on the size of the population, but the scale of a high-caliber workforce is more important.
