WASHINGTON: Twitter CEO Elon Musk reacted to the recent United Nations projections that India will overtake China as the world's most populous country on July 1.
Musk believed that the country's demographics will instead determine how it evolves.
Taking to Twitter, Musk said, "Demographics is destiny." Recently, the UN projected that India now has 1428.6 million people while China's population stands at 1425.7 million.
Earlier, in August, Musk said that the population collapsed due to low birth rates, which is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.
This is for the first time that India has topped the United Nations' list of most populated countries, ever since the UN began collecting population data in 1950.
The year before, China's population shrank for the first time since 1960. In 2016, Beijing ended its strict "one-child policy," imposed in the 1980s amid overpopulation fears, and began letting couples have three children in 2021.
China faces an impending demographic decline, as its workforce ages and fertility rates decrease. Meanwhile, the United States is in the third position with an estimated population of 340 million. India has not performed a census since 2011, hence there are no fresh official statistics available on its population size.
The once-in-a-decade census in India was scheduled to take place in 2021 but was postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak. The global population is expected to hit 8.045 billion by mid-2023, according to UN data.
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