India’s total fertility rate has declined to 1.9 births per woman, falling below the replacement level of 2.1.
India’s population will touch 1.46 billion in 2025, the highest in the world, though the country’s fertility rates have fallen below the replacement threshold, which will stabilise the population size over the coming decades, according to a United Nations report released on Tuesday.
China with 1.41 billion population is the second most populous country after India.
The United Nations Population Fund Report on the State of the World Population titled “The Real Fertility Crisis” estimates that India’s population will peak at 1.7 billion over the next 40 years before starting to fall.
The assessment is based on the current fertility rate of 1.9 births per woman in India, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman.
This effectively means fewer children are being born in India than needed to maintain the population size from one generation to the next, without migration.
Data for this report was also gathered through an online survey of 14,000 adults, both men and women, in 14 countries that constitute 37% of the global population.
The survey shows that one in five women in India had more children than intended due to expectations of the community.
Fourteen percent of respondents felt they underachieved fertility goals because of pressure from doctors and health workers, while 30% of women said they felt pressured to keep the pregnancy when they did not want to.
The demographic details in the report show India has a relatively young population, with over a quarter of the people between the ages of 10 and 24. Only 7% of the population is over the age of 64 years.
India is bracketed as a middle-income country whose population doubling time is estimated to be 79 years.