In a claim that has not gone down well with demographers, an academic has claimed that India, not China, is the world’s most-populous nation with 1.32 billion people.
According to The Guardian, Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic has said that China has been inflating its population statistics. Yi reportedly said that Chinese statisticians have been inflating the numbers over the past 26 years. Yi says that the Chinese number of 1.38 billion has an addition of 90 million people who do not exist, and pegs the number at 1.29 billion.
India has approximately 1.3 billion people and according to Yi, the number is 1.32 billion. That would make India richer by about 30 million people.
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“I think the real number is 1.29 billion but the government thinks it is 1.38 billion,” Yi reportedly said, adding that “India is maybe 1.32 billion right now.”
The academic is known to be a vocal critic of China’s family-planning laws. China had abandoned the one-child policy in favour of a two-child policy in 2015.
Experts have trashed Yi’s claims to the newspaper, however. Wang Feng, a demographer from the University of California told The Guardian that Yi’s numbers have come from ‘back-of-the envelope’ calculations and that he had a political agenda against the Chinese government.
Demographers from India were also quoted as saying that the claim was debatable, saying that the population growth in the country had stunted.
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India’s population currently stands at about 1.3 billion and a 17.7 percent rise was recorded according to the last census in 2011.
