According to The World Population Prospects 2024 report released by the United Nations, the global population is expected to reach around 10.3 billion in 2084, up from 8.2 billion in 2024, before declining and then stabilising at the end of the century. The report, which sampled data from 237 countries, also highlighted that the populations of 63 countries, including China, have already peaked, those of 48 nations are about to peak in the next three decades, and the rest 126 countries — this list includes India — will witness their demographics stabilising in the next century. The cut-off date is two years earlier than what the UN had predicted in its annual estimation in 2022 and significantly earlier than what the forecasts had mentioned in the 1980s — that the global population would not peak until the 22nd century. Two things can be concluded from this: first, that the population growth will see an upward curve in the next few decades before slowing down rapidly and, second, the advancement of the timeline for this to happen will lead to advantages as well as challenges. It is true that the world will be bursting at the seams in the near future given the burden of a 10-billion-strong human population but this, mercifully, would be the result of past, not present, growth. On the other hand, a stabilising population is suggestive of falling birth rates as a result of which most countries will have ageing populations with no opportunity to cash in on their demographic dividends.
The situation in India is both good and bad. Even though the UN report mandates that India will continue to be the most populous country until the next century, it will see a 12% drop in population by the 2060s. Things seem to be slowing down already with a recent report by the Union ministry of health saying that as many as 31 out of the 36 states and Union territories have achieved the replacement fertility level of 2.1. The scientific data should stop the mischievous political rhetoric that demands a law for population control because the nation apparently would be teeming with members of a minority community. The real challenge for Indian policymakers and the government is to utilise the accrued demographic dividend before it is too late. Everything else — the talk of a population bomb that will threaten the majority community — is bunkum.