Does India have the highest population in the world?

You may rejoice that India has surpassed superpower China in at least one field. You will have to hold your jubilations for this field may very well be population figures.

According to an independent researcher, India may have seen more births last year than its neighbour, resulting in a difference of 80 million, with India in the lead. If reports of Yi Fuxian, a researcher from University of Wisconsin-Madison, are to be believed, then the China might have miscalculated its fertility rate.

Fuxian claims in his study that China's fertility was a meagre 1.05 children per women, which the official figures estimate at 1.6. This would mean that the China has accounted 90 million children that may not have been born, claims Fuxian's study.

Based on his findings, Financial Times pegged the total population of China at 1.29 billion in 2016. Meanwhile, India's population in the same time has been 1.37 billion as per the data available with National Bureau of Statistics.

Even United Nations had predicted a similar scenario but that was supposed to come to pass no earlier than 2022. Fuxian believes that China has been exaggerating its population figures since long, something which has been on the minds of other researchers as well. He claims that China has had only 377.6 million births since 1991 to 2016, much less than official figure of 464.8 million.

China has seen a sharp decline in its population after implementing stringent population control measures like 'one child, one policy', which has been repealed now. Now, the country is finding it difficult to get young workforce to drive its economic activities.