India: Surpassing China, will it be the world’s workforce?
Move over, China. India is now the world’s most populous nation, said Dipu Rai in India Today. The U.N. announced this “major demographic shift” last week, releasing data that put India’s population at 1.428 billion, nudging past China at 1.425 billion. The gap will only widen, as the U.N. predicts that for the next three decades, China’s population will continue to fall while India’s will keep growing. And it’s not just that India will have more people—it will have far more workers. The difference in the two countries’ age makeup is already stark: Right now, just 1 in 10 Indians is over 60, compared with 1 in 6 Chinese. As more Indians have babies and fewer Chinese do, that gap will only grow. China faces a future of labor shortages and slower economic growth, as its workers struggle to support its elderly. India, meanwhile, will have the largest working-age population in the world. All those international manufacturers that once set up shop in China, turbocharging its economy, could now turn to India instead.
But Indians aren’t necessarily celebrating, said The Hindu in an editorial. This country has long “had a vacillating relationship with the size of its population.” During the socialist era, our growing population was “a convenient excuse” to explain away our persistent poverty. With the high population seen as unsustainable, the government’s solution was “deranged sterilization programs” for both men and women, which “violently compromised dignity and freedom.” In 1976 alone, a shocking 6 million men underwent forced sterilizations. Only later, in the 1990s, did we realize that a large population could be an advantage, with people seen as not just mouths to feed but labor to power the economy.
The problem is that not all our workingage people are in fact workers, said The Economic Times in an editorial. Women are woefully underrepresented in the labor force, with just 19 percent of them in jobs. And the “mad scramble for opportunities among Indian youth” is a source of embarrassment every year during hiring fairs. Last year, for example, 12.5 million Indians applied for just 35,000 rail jobs, and some of those who were turned away rioted. Part of the problem is that our young people are undereducated. A boom in dubious, fly-by-night colleges has produced a generation saddled with “worthless degrees” that confer “limited or no skills.” When China first began its rise, unskilled labor was much more in demand than it is now. So even though we’ve surpassed China in population, we have yet to become a more desirable labor force. With skilled workers making up 24 percent of the labor force in China and “a paltry 3 percent” here, “the ‘demographic dividend’ isn’t as achievable as it seems.”
India does have one edge over China: It is a democracy, said The Times (U.K.) in an editorial. Unfortunately, it may be imperiling that advantage. Indian democracy is under stress from the “increasingly authoritarian” government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose promotion of Hindu supremacism “threatens to undermine the secular foundation” of the country. For now, India still has “by far the biggest human potential” in the world. Whether it can realize that potential, though, is an open question.