Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

Has India reached / is it reaching Peak Child? I know predictions globally are for ~9Bn people, I wonder how much of that will be in India.

View on HN

India is projected to be one of the twelve countries who together will account for 50% of the world's population growth until 2050, at which point it's assumed India will host 1.7 billion humans. Asia will in total have gone from 4.3 to 5.2 billions, which is by far not as dramatic as the projected growth of Africa from 1.1 billion now to 2.5 billion in 2050.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

> Indian people I have talked to are enthusiastic about the prospect of edging out China in terms of future economy, and population size is seen as the primary means of achieving that.

Huh? The problem with that statement is the sample size. Even if you talked to every Indian person you know (presumably anywhere between 100 and 10000), it will be less than 0.001% of the total population of India.

Edit: Grammer.

Yes, it's anecdotal, that's why I had prefaced the entire paragraph with a huge disclaimer. But I see how complementing a string of google-able facts with some personal impressions and experiences might be perceived as gratuitous, and that's why I removed it now.

Good, now edit your spelling too!

No, they haven't. As of 2013, the UN projected India's population to surpass China by 2028, and peak at ca. 1.6 billion in 2050, and fall back to about 1.5 billion by 2100.

For comparison China is expected to start declining around 2030, and fall to around 1.1 billion by 2100.

How in the world can someone make anything but a wild ass guess about what the population patterns will be 84 years from now? Even 20 year predictions are dubious IMHO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com