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I found this article to have good facts, and a mild sway left or right. However, knowing that NPR does favor the liberal side of the spectrum, I noticed that there was some influence. This article tried to understand why the population boom was occurring and the threat that it played in India, not so much how it affected other countries. The major cause that they spoke to was lack of women's rights and birth control. This is a very liberal idea which I found to fit the news source.

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MUMBAI, India - In a sparse, one-room apartment on the far periphery of a booming megacity, the piercing cry of a newborn baby marks a population milestone for India.

He's a boy named Vehant, born on Nov. 9 and weighing nearly 8 pounds. His first days were difficult; he developed a blood infection and was hospitalized for 10 days. Now he's back home.

In many ways, Vehant embodies the new India. He's the first in his family to be born in a hospital. His parents married for love - a rarity in a country where matchmaking is a tradition. And their young family - now settled on the fast-growing edge of India's biggest city, Mumbai - is the product of a massive wave of migration out of India's countryside.

"I cannot imagine him being born back in our village, without the kind of facilities we've had access to here," says his 24-year-old mother, Naina Agrahari, who was born on the floor of her grandmother's rural home.

Vehant has another distinction: He is one of the many babies who, in the months ahead, will bring India a new global title.

The United Nations says that sometime in 2023, India will officially overtake China as the most populous country in the world. It may actually have happened already: India hasn't had a census since 2011.

India, not China, will soon have the largest population in the world

According to the U.N.'s World Population Dashboard, China still had slightly more people than India at the end of 2022: 1.4485 billion, compared to India's 1.4066 billion. But China's population has stabilized and is set to shrink, while India's is still growing - pretty fast.

More babies are born each year in India than any other country in the world. (The U.N. estimates more than 24 million annually, but the true number is likely higher because many births never get registered.) And more of them are born in burgeoning megacities like Mumbai - with a population of more than 22 million - than ever before.

Compared to previous generations, these newborn Indians are more likely to be born in a hospital than at home; more likely to survive to adulthood; more likely to become literate, educated and multilingual; and more likely to migrate within their lifetime, to different parts of their own country or the rest of the world.

And if efforts to eradicate female feticide are successful, the next generation of Indians will have more females than in recent decades.

Women and girls are the big beneficiaries of India's population boom, and they're changing the country in profound and unexpected ways, demographers say. The story of Vehant's mother - and the choices she's made - reflect the way that this new generation will grow up with far different prospects than past generations and will change the country itself.

Meet Vehant's mom

In October 2022, a racy Bollywood love song bounces off the concrete walls of Naina Agrahari's otherwise empty, dank little apartment in northern Mumbai. Two frames adorn the wall: a photo collage of Agrahari and her husband, arm in arm, and a cartoon poster of two cherubs in a garden.

Agrahari sings Hindi lyrics as she waddles around in a ruffled pink maternity dress while folding laundry. She jokes that she should probably learn "Baa Baa Black Sheep" instead, because she's nine months pregnant.

"It never occurred to me to learn nursery rhymes!" she says, laughing. "I have been so involved in my job as a financial consultant, but now that I'm about to give birth, I should probably learn some baby stuff."

In 2010, Agrahari moved to Mumbai with her parents and siblings from their native village in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. The family settled in Nala Sopara, a small suburb on Mumbai's northern outskirts that has seen its population double to nearly 200,000 in the past 20 years, with an influx of migrants like them.

Agrahari is the first woman in her immediate family to have a paid career outside the home. And she's the first in her family to give birth in a hospital. She and her siblings were all born at home in their village with the help of a local midwife.

This kind of transition from rural/village life to urban life by many Indians is having a profound impact. India's infant mortality has more than halved in recent decades, from 65 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 27 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2020, according to World Bank data. That dramatic drop is credited at least in part to better overall health outcomes from better access to medical care in cities, rather than the countryside.

And these children will find a brighter future than the newborns of past decades. Agrahari's child is more likely than his ancestors to be healthy, in an urban setting rather than a rural one. He's more likely to learn languages in polyglot Mumbai, where migrants arrive speaking hundreds of regional languages from all over India. And with relative prosperity, Vehant is also more likely to travel, for work or for tourism.

"I want my child to study medicine and to go abroad for an even better education," Agrahari says, laughing off the idea that she's already grooming a little overachiever.

Unlike the Agrahari family, most Indians still live in rural areas. About a third of the country lives in areas classified as urban. But according to government data, that'll surpass 40% by 2030 - and continue to rise.

The wave of migration that Agrahari is part of has only just begun.

Each year, tens of millions of Indians move out of rural agricultural areas and into huge, crowded urban centers like Mumbai. It's a change that'll characterize her baby's generation. And it may also saddle them with some environmental problems associated with densely populated cities: smog, inadequate infrastructure and economic inequality.

There's one especially important way urbanization is changing India's demographics: Even as the country's population rises, women in cities are having fewer babies than rural women.

"Given the cost of living in urban areas, but also higher income and access to services, we see the population stabilizing in Indian cities," says Andrea Wojnar, India representative for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). "It tends to be in rural areas, where families are still living agrarian lives, that they need to have - or want to have - larger families."

In the 1960s, India's fertility rate was nearly six children per woman. But by 2017, it had fallen to 2.4 children per woman in rural areas - and 1.7 in urban ones.

How female infanticide and feticide left India with a sex gap

When NPR first visited the home of Agrahari and her husband, 27-year-old Sumit Chauhan, in October, they did not know their baby's sex. Ultrasounds to determine that are illegal in India.

"We're not allowed to learn the sex of an unborn baby, because if the child is female, some mothers feel family pressure to abort. In villages, this happens a lot," Agrahari explains. "Some people don't want a girl child."

India, like many developing countries - including China under its "one-child" policy - has long had a preference for sons. In extreme cases, that has resulted in female infanticide, when parents actually kill their own newborn girls. In the 1980s, when prenatal sex determination tests became more affordable and widespread, India saw a steady increase in abortions of female fetuses. (Abortion was legalized in India in 1971.)

All of that has left India - like China - with a wide sex ratio. Government data shows that in 1991, there were 945 females ages 0-6 in India for every 1,000 males. In 2011, that figure declined to 918 females per 1,000 males.

But a new report by the Pew Research Center suggests that trend may be reversing. In the past few years, more girls have been born in India. Experts are trying to figure out why.

It could be due to the success of an Indian government program called Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao -- "Save the daughter, educate the daughter." Or it could be a mere blip in the statistics, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, says A.L. Sharada, a demographer and director of Population First, a social welfare group based in Mumbai.

"Some of the latest data shows sex ratios are improving, but it could be because people might not have been able to access abortion services during the pandemic," Sharada notes. "So we have to see if this trend will continue."

How female education is changing India's birthrate

Agrahari says the message of the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign has rubbed off on her family. Her 46-year-old mother, Gudiya Vaishya, who has a sixth-grade education, moved her family to Mumbai, in part, so that her daughters - Agrahari and her younger sister Khushi Vaishya - could have careers.

"It's all about the mindset. Because of my mother's dedication, I took English tuition [after-school classes] in Mumbai, at a time when our other relatives [in rural Uttar Pradesh] were saying, 'What difference does it make?'" recalls Khushi Vaishya. "My mother came from a background where this wasn't common. But because of her, I got into college."

Vaishya is now studying for a bachelor's degree in economics. Agrahari graduated from 12th grade and has since started her own financial consulting company, specializing in various types of loan products. She plans to return to paid work, outside the home, after a six-month maternity leave.

She also had a love marriage - a rarity in India, where most marriages are arranged by families.

Agrahari and her husband, a fellow migrant from Uttar Pradesh, say they want one or possibly two children - not five like Agrahari's mother, or six like her grandmother, who never went to school.

"On average, a girl who studies up to 12th grade has fewer children than a girl who's not literate, and a woman who works has fewer children than a woman who does not work," says Sharada, the demographer. "A family which earns more has fewer children than a family that doesn't earn much."

Agrahari's father is also from a big family. He's one of six children, she notes.

"But that is only because his father died before his wife - my grandmother - could become pregnant again!" she laughs.

How far India has come and what challenges lie ahead

India celebrated its 75th birthday last year. Since 1947, India has transformed from a subcontinent impoverished by British colonial rule, to an Asian regional power with big urban centers of technology, innovation, constant construction and growth.

When we talk about booming Asian megacities, we used to think primarily of China. But India has now joined those ranks.

"China will achieve its peak population size [this year], whereas India will continue to experience momentum for several decades to come, before the population actually stabilizes," the UNFPA's Wojnar says. "This represents a great opportunity for India. With the largest number of young people anywhere in the world, there's a huge opportunity - a huge potential - to tap into, to enjoy greater economic growth and development."

But the challenge, Wojnar and others say, is for India to create enough opportunities in education and employment for all of these young people streaming into India's big cities or being born in them.

"This is the most important thing for a country: to keep pace with growth of the population by providing health care, education, and the conditions for jobs," Wojnar says. "The challenges are anywhere where women and girls don't have decision-making power, where they have lower levels of literacy and where they're not able to exercise their reproductive rights and choices."

Those challenges are especially acute in Dharavi, one of the biggest slums in Mumbai - and in all of Asia. It's a step down from the northern suburb where Agrahari lives. In Dharavi, there are shared toilets for dozens of families.

Offering prenatal care to women who don't realize they need it

The narrow lanes of Dharavi are a cacophony of sights, smells and regional languages from all over South Asia. Officially, the less than 1-square-mile neighborhood is home to at least a million people, but the real figure is probably way more. This is one of the first stops for migrants seeking affordable housing as they arrive in Mumbai from rural areas.

Many of the women who arrive here are pregnant and anemic.

"They are coming here for their livelihood, but many of them have no knowledge health, hygiene - or how to care for a malnourished child," says Vanita Vittal Sondhe, a social worker and program coordinator at SNEHA, a nonprofit organization that works with women, children and public health in Mumbai.

Sondhe's job is to go door to door in Dharavi, offering prenatal care to women who often don't realize they need it. She gives them information on maternal and childhood nutrition and helps them book medical appointments at Sion Hospital, a big public facility nearby.

For some of them, it's not only their first childbirth in a clinical setting. It's their first time setting foot in any hospital altogether.

"I didn't know that I should eat eggs, drink milk and consume more vegetables while I'm nursing. They told me all of that when I visited the hospital," says Shabana Khatoon, 23, who is one of Sondhe's clients.

Khatoon recently moved to Dharavi from Jharkhand, a relatively poor state in eastern India. She and her husband, who works as a tailor, have rented a single-room apartment that measures about 40 square feet for the equivalent of about $42 a month. They share the flat with their toddler and Khatoon's brother-in-law, who works as a day laborer. There's barely enough room for them all to stretch out on the floor, with their feet out the door.

Their toddler - a little girl - was born in Jharkhand and diagnosed as malnourished when she arrived in Mumbai. Now Khatoon is pregnant again.

"She is not getting a proper diet. But they are still doing better in Mumbai than in their native place," Sondhe explains. "That's why they come."

NPR asks Khatoon how many children she wants to have.

"As many as my husband wants," she replies quietly, fiddling with the bangle bracelets on her wrist.

If the child she's pregnant with now turns out to be a boy, she'd like to stop after that. But if it's a girl, she'll try to get pregnant again, she says.

A bouncing baby boy, with a blood infection

Several weeks later after our first meeting, NPR returns to visit Agrahari, the financial consultant. She's just given birth, on Nov. 9, to a baby boy. They've named him Vehant, a Hindi word meaning intelligent.

Agrahari's mother and sister are helping her take care of him. As they coo over the baby, the women marvel at how it's only recently, in their family, that women could choose how many babies to have.

"I don't think my mother had any choice over how many kids to have," says Vaishya. "Her mother-in-law - my father's mother - wanted to have the house filled with children."

"In a way, it was our grandmother's choice, how many siblings we have," Agrahari chimes in.

Her own birthing experience was painful, she says. "One is enough! I don't want to even talk about having a second baby."

Newborn Vehant developed a blood infection and was hospitalized for 10 days. He had to get injections, in the bottoms of his tiny feet, three or four times a day, Agrahari recalls.

She shudders to think what would have happened had he been born at home, like all of his ancestors before him.

"My child is so strong, so calm. He didn't flinch in the face of all these complicated procedures," she says with pride. "If we'd been in our village, I wouldn't have even known what was wrong with him."

Instead, little Vehant is now healthy and will grow up in Mumbai in a new generation of Indians - in the most populous country in the world.
NPR producer Raksha Kumar and freelance producer Sumita Chauhan both contributed to this story from Mumbai.

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This baby could push India past China to become the world's most populous country

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MUMBAI, India - In a sparse, one-room apartment on the far periphery of a booming megacity, the piercing cry of a newborn baby marks a population milestone for India. He's a boy named Vehant, born on Nov. 9 and weighing nearly 8 pounds.

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This article is a very fact based article that describes the population boom in India. The main points of the article are that the population in India is projected to surpass China's population in the near future. Reuters is a news wire that is based in London. The article is relatively fact based and I believe is reliable.

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NEW DELHI, Nov 15 (Reuters) - As the global population reaches 8 billion, India, formerly a powerful driver of the number of people on the planet, is experiencing a marked slowdown.

Falling fertility rates in the South Asian country have forced at least one state to consider reviewing policies that encouraged families not to go beyond having two children.

The world's population is estimated by the United Nations to have hit 8 billion on Nov. 15, with China and India accounting for more than a third of the total. India estimates its population at 1.38 billion, slightly lower than the 1.4 billion that the World Bank estimates for China.

India will become the most populous country in 2023, according to the United Nations.

But India's annual population growth has averaged 1.2% since 2011, compared with 1.7% in the 10 years previously, government figures show.

Further slowing can be expected. India's total fertility rate (TFR) - children per woman - fell to 2 in the latest assessment period, for 2019-2021, from 3.4 in 1992-93, according to a government report issued last month. It estimated that the average must be 2.1 for the population to reproduce itself.

Increasing use of contraceptives and rising education among girls could have contributed to the decline in fertility rates, the government says.

The use of family-planning methods jumped to 66.7% in 2019-21 from 53.5% in 2015-16.

That indicated that India's national population policies and health systems were working, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said in comments shared with Reuters.

"As India invests in its younger people, it needs to make plans for a demographic transition to take better care of a greater proportion of older people in the future," the UNFPA said.

In Odisha, an eastern state, the TFR dropped 21% in only 11 years, between 2008/10 and 2019/21, maybe too fast from the point of view of the government there.

"Odisha may need to relook at the policy framework that promotes a two-child norm," the state's Planning and Convergence Department said in a June note seen by Reuters. The policies discourage exceeding two but do not encourage reaching that number.

The northeastern state of Assam, with its TFR higher than the national average, is still pushing in the other direction.

In January, it implemented a policy that made anyone with more than two children ineligible for government jobs and election to local and civic bodies.

"This is the need of the hour to have such a legislation in place," Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told Reuters.

But such measures have limited impact on fertility, the UNFPA said, citing global experience.

"Most such schemes have had only a marginal impact on fertility and in some cases have even been counterproductive," the UN agency said.

Additional reporting by Shivam Patel in New Delhi; Writing by Krishna N. Das and Shilpa Jamkhandikar

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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India's population growth slows as world reaches 8 billion

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NEW DELHI, Nov 15 (Reuters) - As the global population reaches 8 billion, India, formerly a powerful driver of the number of people on the planet, is experiencing a marked slowdown. Falling fertility rates in the South Asian country have forced at least one state to consider reviewing policies that encouraged families not to go beyond having two children.

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BBC, an English based publishing agent published an article regarding the population boom, but was in more of a competitive light. BBC's author used hard wording when talking about China and India such as "Asian giants" or "forced sterilization". Maybe these are just being used to gain readers, but the wording gave off negative impressions to me. The factors were on par with the rest of the media sources.

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India v China: Is becoming the most populous country a boon or curse?

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India is forecast to surpass China as the world’s most populous country. What does this mean for India?

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Lauren Frayer is a renowned journalist for NPR. She is a boots on the ground reporter who disclosed her past locations, but does not share where she is currently living. Frayer retweets many human rights related posts and shares her opinions on social issues and more personal posts such as sports.

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Tweets by lfrayer

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Lauren Frayer covers South Asia for NPR News. In 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood-Mumbai.

She has covered the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the aftermath of Sri Lanka's civil war and the power of a 19th century short story to combat racism against Afghan refugees. In 2019, she met the Dalai Lama at his monastery in northern India, and reported on the sticky geopolitics of who decides his successor. On Mahatma Gandhi's 150 th birthday, Frayer examined how his legacy has changed.

When a 6-year-old Indian girl died of heat stroke on the U.S.-Mexico border, Frayer traced her path back to the Punjab, met her grieving grandparents - and uncovered a smuggling ring responsible for a 10,000% spike in the number of Indians detained on that border. For a year, Frayer followed an interfaith couple whose wedding plans were upended by 'Love Jihad' - an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that's now law in several Indian states.

In 2022, Frayer was awarded the Overseas Press Club of America's Lowell Thomas Award for her coverage of India's COVID-19 outbreak, and a Gracie Award for coverage of India's farmer protests.

Frayer reported on caste discrimination for a 2020 episode of NPR's Rough Translation podcast, and is working on a new podcast about love marriage in India.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Frayer was in the first batch of NPR reporters to cross from Poland into the embattled country. She chronicled the flow of Ukrainian refugees out, and military volunteers in. She also reported on the surprisingly long history of Ukrainian women in combat, a spiritual revolt among Orthodox Christians and how Ukrainian rock stars are turning their trauma into art.

Before moving to India, Frayer was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.

In Europe, Frayer profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. In the fall of 2015, Frayer spent two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans - and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders - by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.

Farther afield, she has introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.

Frayer has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.

Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

On a break from journalism, Frayer drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.

Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Frayer holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.

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Lauren Frayer covers South Asia for NPR News. In 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood-Mumbai. She has covered the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the aftermath of Sri Lanka's civil war and the power of a 19th century short story to combat racism against Afghan refugees.

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Krishna Das is a reporter for Reuters who is located in South Asia. He is boots on the ground and reports on topics such as local politics and global affairs. His twitter is pretty opinionated however non of his posts has information that pertain to him. There are no personal pictures, locations, or current events related to his life.

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Tweets by krishnadas56

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20 feb population is speculated to finally surpass China

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How India's Record-Breaking Population Will Shape the World

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India is set to become the world's most populous country. That makes it a major player on the global stage, experts say.

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The Japanese times is a privately owned news source who's slogan is the "independent voice of Asia". The major difference that I saw when looking at this article in comparison to other articles about the same topic is that it was more opinionated in the verbiage. The facts were relatively the same as many of the other sources, but they looked at the issue a little differently. You can even tell from the title, words such as "looming", which have a negative connotation, are used to describe the issue.

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India looks set to end a tumultuous year on a celebratory note, marking both 75 years of independence and the start of its Group of 20 presidency.

But another milestone is looming. United Nations experts estimate that on April 14, 2023, India will officially overtake China and become the world's most populous country.

That is not necessarily cause for celebration. China occupies approximately 9.6 million square kilometers (3.7 million square miles), compared to India's 3.3 million square kilometers, which makes India's population density nearly three times higher than China's. Yet, unlike China, India struggles to feed, educate and care for its 1.4 billion people, despite its impressive growth rate over the last three decades.

In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

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India looks set to end a tumultuous year on a celebratory note, marking both 75 years of independence and the start of its Group of 20 presidency. But another milestone is looming. United Nations experts estimate that on April 14, 2023, India will officially overtake China and become the world's most populous country.

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This is a follow up article explaining so comments that were above.

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Company Profile | The Japan Times Online

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The Japan Times Online provides daily English-language news reports and features on Japan, covering national news, business news, sports news, plus analysis and information on entertainment, art, leisure and communities in Tokyo and other major cities.

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This article falls under the variability in reliability and slightly liberal. Of the other articles that are shown on the Bias Chart, this one is the lowest in reliability. After reading the article, I believe that it is because it uses words such as "liability" or other choice words that don't necessarily match facts. In my opinion, it makes sense for this to be left based because it is in regard to human rights and women's inability to have birth control.

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India is likely to overtake China as the world's most populous country in 2023- if it hasn't already. It will be the first shake-up at the top of the globe's population rankings in centuries-one that reflects the two country's divergent demographic and economic trajectories. India is expected to continue growing, in terms of both population and economy. China, meanwhile, is unlikely to return to its heady pre-pandemic GDP growth rates, and on Tuesday reported its first population decline since 1961.

The UN expects the gap between Nos. 1 and 2 to only grow from here, with India's population swelling to 1.7 billion by 2050, compared to China's 1.3 billion. (The U.S. will remain a distant third with a projected 375 million people by mid-century.)

Indian officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are painting the demographic reordering as a reason to bet on the country's future manufacturing success, since the country's population boom is causing its working-age population to bulge. More workers can produce more goods and services, earning heftier incomes that fuel higher consumption and investment.

This so-called "demographic dividend"-in which demographic changes foster a large pool of working-age people-helped South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China become manufacturing powerhouses, and India hopes the same will happen to its economy. Gautam Adani, the world's fourth-richest man, has suggested that India's young population will add $1 trillion to India's GDP every 12 to 18 months. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a trade association of local manufacturers, forecast in a March report that India could grow to a $40 trillion economy -larger than the U.S.'s today-by 2047 if it adequately leverages its young population.

But the CII also warned that "if India does not create enough jobs and its workers are not adequately prepared for those jobs, its demographic dividend may turn into a liability." Economists and experts have long warned thatthe Indian economy can't coast on a growing population alone. The country continues to struggle with high unemployment, low labor participation, and a sizable informal economy. India's failure to provide good jobs could squander its demographic opportunity, preventing it from capitalizing on its working-age population boom.

"The challenge with India is not so much its population, but what the country does with it," says Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor of demography at Abu Dhabi's Khalifa University.

India's on the cusp of a demographic dividend

India's population is young. Around 18% of the country's population is under the age of 20, with tens of millions poised to enter the workforce over the next decade. (In contrast, only 12.5% of people in both China and the U.S. are under 20).

The country's fertility rate is already starting to slow as the country develops. India most recently recorded 2.0 births per woman in 2022, slightly below the replacement level of 2.1 births.

The combination of a large young population and a falling fertility rate puts Indiaon the cusp of a demographic dividend, in which the ratio between the working and non-working age population is at its largest.Adults with fewer dependents spend or save their money instead of funneling it to their children or aging parents, boosting consumption and investment, growing the economy, and raising living standards across the country.

Some experts reject the term 'demographic dividend' because countries that experience it assume its positive economic outcome is inevitable, says Tim Dyson, an expert on Indian demographics at the London School of Economics. In reality, not every government is equipped to capitalize on the transition.

How China capitalized on its working-age population boom

China was able to take advantage of its demographic dividend. The country forced a rapid decrease in fertility through its aggressive-and controversial-One Child Policy, sparking its demographic dividend early. China also had a high female labor participation rate, meaning both men and women of working age were looking for jobs.

The country's economic reforms also attracted foreign manufacturers in search of cheap labor, connecting Chinese factories to global supply chains. Chinese households also saved much of their income, helping to fuel further investments in industry.

China's policies weren't perfect: economists think the country squandered the first decade of its demographic dividend by not creating manufacturing jobs fast enough. Beijing also encouraged investment in less productive entities like its state-owned enterprises. And the country's harsh family planning policies are now causing China's population to age rapidly.

Yet China's experience is instructive as to what other countries must do to take advantage of the demographic dividend: create enough jobs in productive sectors like manufacturing for people entering the workforce; enact policy reforms to encourage local and foreign businesses to invest; and foster either a large consumer market or a high savings rate to fuel investment.

India's high fertility rate, low female labor participation

India lacks many of the traits that allowed China to take advantage of its bulging working-age population.

First, India's fertility rate, while declining, is not falling at the same rate as other countries-nor is it falling uniformly; fertility remains stubbornly high in poorer states like Bihar.

Second, the country has an abysmal female labor participation rate. According to the International Labor Organization, only 19% of India's women are in the labor force, a share that has steadily declined for almost a decade. (By comparison, the neighboring South Asian economy of Bangladesh reports a female labor participation rate of 35%. In China, the rate is 62%.)

The COVID pandemic removed women from the workforce; they stayed home to care for their families. "If one parent was going to keep the job, it was going to be the father," says Mansi Choksi, an Indian journalist and author of The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India. But she also notes a deeper cultural norm that discourages women from joining the workforce. Choksi says a "commonplace way of framing" the question of female labor participation is "why should a woman work if she doesn't need to work?"

India is losing its most productive jobs

India also has an unemployment problem. The country's joblessness rate stood at 8.3% in December, the highest since August 2021, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy. And the need for work will only increase: India will need 90 million non-farm jobs by 2030, estimates the McKinsey Global Institute.

Economists have pointed to several forces holding back job creation in India-burdensome regulations, high tariffs on imported components, low productivity, and a small middle-class market. Foreign companies also complain about regulations and bureaucracy holding up investment and delaying projects.

India has struggled to grow manufacturing jobs despite interest from some foreign companies like Apple.

To make India's challenge even harder, the country is losing jobs in manufacturing, which produces more economic output per worker than other sectors of the economy. India's manufacturing workforce fell by almost 50% in just six years, from 51 million in 2017 to 27.3 million in 2021. Indian workers instead went into agriculture and services, sectors with lower labor productivity.

All countries shift from manufacturing to services as they reach high-income, but countries like India may be going through this evolution earlier than expected. Some economists say "premature deindustrialization" is reducing the number of productive jobs, making it harder for countries like India to fully capitalize on their growing working-age populations.

India's strong IT and tech sector, evidenced by companies like Infosys and Wipro and startups like Flipkart, may not be a good replacement for manufacturing. "India's rise as a digital powerhouse, no matter how successful, seems unlikely to generate sufficient economy-wide benefits to effect the broader structural transformation that the country needs," Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic advisor to India, wrote in Foreign Affairs.

"I like to characterize India as having over-invested in the knowledge economy," says Keith Hartley, CEO of supply management platform LevaData. He suggests that Indian companies have been more focused on programming, support and other "knowledge jobs."

"India should be the next great developing ground for manufacturing, but honestly I have just not experienced that yet," he says.

Many Indians also work in the "informal economy" or business activities that are not recognized or taxed by the government. Such work accounts for about 20% of the country's economy, according to estimates from the State Bank of India in 2021, down from 52% before the pandemic.

Jobs in the informal sector-think selling soft drinks by the side of the road-tend to have low labor productivity, meaning they don't produce much surplus output that can be funneled back into the economy. The government also doesn't tax informal work, creating a narrow tax base that doesn't cover the whole economy.

The mismatch between the demand for skilled labor and what's available in the labor force means "it's not simply a matter of whether or not there's enough good jobs, it's also very much a matter of whether there are enough reasonably qualified people to fill those jobs," says Dyson.

How could India create more jobs?

Modi's government has offered to create 1 million new jobs in the government, but that's unlikely to make a dent in the job shortfall. Demographers, economists and business leaders all agree that India needs to somehow increase the number of good jobs before the country's mass of working-age people becomes a liability rather than an asset.

Some large foreign companies, like Apple, and Foxconn are planning to expand their operations in India, following COVID disruptions to China's manufacturing. But companies are still being tripped up by unclear government policies: Bloomberg reports that Samsung is locked in a dispute with the Indian government about manufacturing subsidies owed to the Korean manufacturer.

To help increase investment, India could streamline its bureaucracy to make investments easier. New Delhi could also lower its import duties on components and sign more free trade agreements for its exports. (Vietnam, which has lower import and export duties than India, has successfully attracted companies like Apple and Samsung). India could also pass policies that focus on its population, such as continued investment in public health and education to improve levels of human capital.

"Younger people need to have good jobs, real productive jobs" Gietel-Basten says. "They've got to be in formal work. And if you look in India, that's still a long way off."

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Can India create enough jobs for its booming population?

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India is likely to overtake China as the world's most populous country in 2023- if it hasn't already. It will be the first shake-up at the top of the globe's population rankings in centuries-one that reflects the two country's divergent demographic and economic trajectories.

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Local News from The Orange County Register

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