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China’s population is shrinking, and India’s will peak by 2063. For both, the legacy of demographic control now collides with irreversible realities.

In the 1950s, both China and India witnessed a rapid increase in population. Assessed by both governments as a threat to national economic development and social well-being, efforts were made to re-engineer demographics to control the unbridled population explosion. The impacts of their policies hold a few lessons for nations, and especially for India.

In 1951, China’s population stood at 553.75 million and India’s at 361.08 million. However, just as the United Nations (UN) in its World Population Prospects 2022 had declared, India’s population reached 1.42 billion by the end of April 2023, overtaking China as the most populous country on earth. China reached its peak population size of 1.42 billion in 2022, following which its demography began to wane. On the other hand, India is expected to witness a surge in population until it peaks at 1.67 billion by mid-2063. However, after 2063, once India reaches that threshold, its demography will enter the phase of decline.

Impressive maternal and child health care services were brought into play in 1953, which remarkably reduced mortality rates, and by 1970, China had added 250 million more people.

During the 1950s, Chinese leadership saw its population as its strength, declaring that  “people are the most precious” of all resources. Impressive maternal and child health care services were brought into play in 1953, which remarkably reduced mortality rates, and by 1970, China had added 250 million more people. This rapid population rise alarmed the Chinese government, as it was putting an enormous strain on public services. It mandated population growth targets in the 1970s that helped pull down the population growth rate. However, its ‘later, longer, fewer’ campaign did not reach targeted results, and by 1982, the Chinese population had exceeded the 1 billion mark. In 1982, China implemented the ‘one child policy’ in the country, directing couples to have only one child and rewarding them with an incentive package. Concurrently, it imposed punitive measures on couples with more than one child through the imposition of financial levies for each additional child, forced abortions and sterilisations, and the exertion of intense social pressure.

The ‘one child policy’—enforced with great rigour—led to unanticipated consequences and resulted in serious imbalances in China’s demography. Its fertility rate dropped from 6.1 in 1970 to 1.28 in 2020, much below the replacement rate. Cultural preference for boys led to a massive gender imbalance; the ratio of old people rose sharply; there were comparatively fewer young people, resulting in a declining workforce and a shrunken consumer market. The Chinese authorities were alarmed by the huge loss in the working-age population, the rising cost of geriatric care, and the long-term adverse consequences on the Chinese economy. Therefore, from 2013, China started rolling back its ‘one child policy’ and ultimately closed it in 2017. After 2022, a ‘three-child policy’ was adopted with a heavy dose of incentives. However, policy changes failed to alleviate the demographic problem. Housing prices soared, and the heightened cost of living deterred Chinese people from having/planning a larger family. The COVID-19 pandemic and China’s zero-COVID initiative further aggravated the conditions. It is now projected that by 2050, China may have 100 million fewer people, resulting in a total population of around 1.3 billion. By the end of the century, the population could decline steeply to 771 million, about half of India’s population in 2100.

The Chinese authorities were alarmed by the huge loss in the working-age population, the rising cost of geriatric care, and the long-term adverse consequences on the Chinese economy.

Focusing on India, its population in 1951 was 361.08 million, rapidly increasing. The Indian government perceived this as a serious obstacle to economic growth and introduced the National Family Planning Programme (1952) to control population. It extended reproductive health services and redoubled the efforts during the 1960s. The target was to reduce the birth rate to 3.9 percent by 1974. However, despite these policy interventions, India’s population rose to 547.94 million by 1971. In the mid-1970s, the government of India experimented with coercive family planning in the shape of forced sterilisation. This led to heavy political backlash, following which the policy was quickly abandoned. Post the 1970s, a new Family Welfare Department was rolled out, and was followed by the National Population Policy of 2000, with the objectives of meeting unmet contraception needs and achieving a stable population by 2045.

Although substantial, the overall impact of India’s population policies was not as extreme as in China’s case. India’s total fertility rate dropped from 5.73 births per woman to 1.96 in 2024. Unlike China, India’s experiment with coercive birth control was brief. Its sex ratio did not get skewed, and a major proportion of the population continued to be young. Even so, India’s population, as estimated, will grow only till 2063 after which it will decelerate. However, long before that, the elderly population would rise sharply, resulting in a smaller workforce and a larger population requiring geriatric care.

The cited examples illustrate how reproductive re-engineering may not yield targeted results and may, in fact, turn counterproductive. They also reveal that reversing such policies may prove ineffective, as ground realities would have significantly changed. Economic development supplements women's empowerment, offers them greater bodily agency, and makes them less prone to shouldering the responsibility of raising larger families, which is often unfairly thrust upon them. Calls for supporting national interest by raising larger families have been ineffective, as seen in the entire developed Western society as well as in Japan and China.

Economic development supplements women's empowerment, offers them greater bodily agency, and makes them less prone to shouldering the responsibility of raising larger families, which is often unfairly thrust upon them.

For India, the key takeaway is that, having already reached fertility rates below replacement level, reversing the demographic trend toward population decline will be an uphill task. No country in human history has succeeded in doing that. Hence, what India needs to do first is not worsen the situation. The government must immediately shut down its population control departments across the country. The institution of family and marriage needs to be extolled, and efforts at raising fertility and providing substantive assistance to families with three children must become top governmental investment, so that the child develops an asset rather than a cost/burden. Nations can afford to disregard demography only at their peril.

Dr Ramanath Jha (ORF)
22 July 2025

 

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