New Delhi: A Chinese academician has set off alarm bells as he claimed that India was now home to the world’s largest number of people.
According to Chinese academician and demographer Yi Fuxian, China’s population may not be 1.37 billion, as official numbers state, and actually be closer to 1.29 billion, which is less than India’s population.
"China's real population may have been about 1.29 billion last year, which is around 90 million fewer people than the official figure released by the National Bureau of Statistics," reports quoted Yi Fuxian, a scholar and demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as saying at a seminar in Peking University on Monday.
“There were 377.6 million new births from 1991 to 2016, which is less than the official figure of 464.8 million,” he was quoted as saying. The scholar has been a critic of the Chinese government’s family planning measures and had previously voiced concerns of an ageing population crisis in China.
Yi is not the only one who has said that China’s population was overstated. “The government has overestimated the birth rate and simultaneously underestimated the speed of demographic changes,” reports quoted Li Jianxin, a demographer at Peking University, as saying.
Indian demographers, on the other hand, had a different story to tell.
“China is still the most populated country, but India will overtake them by 2015,” reports quoted Indian demographer Laushram Ladu Singh from Mumbai International Institute for Population Sciences as saying.
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