# How many Indians are there, and where is the population heading?

> India is the world’s most populous country, still growing, but fertility has fallen below replacement. The population will peak in the 2060s and then decline.

**145.1 crore and climbing, but the brakes are on**

India’s population is estimated at 145.1 crore, more than triple the 43.6 crore of 1960. It overtook China in 2023 to become the most populous nation. Yet, the total fertility rate has dropped from 5.92 births per woman in 1960 to 1.96 today, below the 2.1 needed for replacement. The country is still growing because of demographic momentum: a huge generation born when families were larger is now in their childbearing years. But the growth rate is slowing, and the UN projects a peak around 2061 near 170 crore, followed by decline. India is ageing at a low income level, raising concerns about getting old before getting rich. All current figures are estimates, not census counts.

## How many people live in India, and how has that changed since 1960?

In 2024, India's population is an estimated 145.1 crore — more than three times the 43.6 crore of 1960. Sit with that for a moment. In a little over sixty years, the country added more than 100 crore people, and the line that tracks it climbs steeply and almost without pause. The ascent quickened after the 1970s, when death rates fell faster than birth rates and each new generation arrived larger than the one before.

But look closely at the top of that curve and you can see it starting to bend. India still adds roughly the population of a mid-sized state every year — yet that annual addition is shrinking. The engine is still running; it has simply stopped accelerating. One caution before we go any further: this is not a headcount. India has not held a census since 2011, so every current figure, including this one, is a statistical estimate stitched together from surveys and models. The real number on the ground could be a few crore either way. What is not in doubt is the direction — and that is the thread this whole article follows: a country still growing, with the brakes quietly coming on.

## How does India's population compare with China and the world?

For most of living memory, "the world's most populous country" meant China. That changed in 2023, quietly, with no statistical fanfare. The World Bank estimates India had 145.1 crore people in 2024 against China's 140.9 crore — and the gap is now widening, because China's population has begun to shrink while India's still inches up. Set against a world population of 814.2 crore, that makes roughly one in every six people alive an Indian.

The comparison with China is the one worth dwelling on, because both are continental-scale societies — but demographically India is a generation behind. China's fertility fell earlier and harder; India slipped below replacement only recently. So the two are passing each other going in opposite directions: India will likely hold the top spot for decades while China's numbers fall. Which raises the obvious question — if India is now the biggest, just how big a share of humanity is that?

## What share of the world's population lives in India?

A large one, and at its highest point in history. In 1960, India was home to 14.4% of the world's people. By 2024 that had climbed to 17.8% — just under a fifth of everyone on earth. The rise did not happen because India grows the fastest; many poorer countries have higher fertility. It happened because India's growth outran the global average for decades, all of it stacked on an already-enormous base.

That imprint is now near its ceiling. As fertility falls across the world, India's share should plateau around 18% in the coming years and then slowly slip back. For now, though, the Indian share of humanity has never been larger — which makes the next question more than academic: where, inside this vast country, do all these people actually live?

## Where do Indians live? Is urbanisation speeding up?

Mostly in villages, still — but the centre of gravity is shifting. In 1960, only 17.9% of Indians lived in towns and cities. By 2024 that had doubled to 35.4%. And yet that still leaves nearly two-thirds of the country rural, which makes India unusual: a giant economy that remains, in the most basic sense, a village society.

This matters enormously for everything that follows, because the city and the countryside are demographically two different worlds. Urban women have far fewer children than rural ones, so every percentage point of urbanisation tugs the national birth rate down. But the pull is gradual. India is not racing through the explosive city-building that remade China or much of Latin America; the move to towns is a slow drift, not a stampede. Keep that rural–urban divide in mind — it is the hidden hand behind almost every number in the next few sections, as we turn from how many Indians there are to why their numbers are finally slowing.

## At what rate is India's population growing, and when will it stop?

Here is the heart of the matter. In the year 2000, India's population was growing at 1.9% a year — and that, it turns out, was the peak. The rate has fallen every year since. The UN's central projection has it crossing below zero around 2061, when the population tops out near 170 crore and then, for the first time in modern history, begins to decline.

So why does a country with fewer and fewer children per woman keep adding people for another four decades? The answer is the single most important idea in this article, so it is worth getting right: **demographic momentum**. The very large generations born when fertility was high are now in their twenties and thirties — their childbearing years. Even if each of them has only one or two children, there are so many of them that total births stay high. In the early 2000s, despite a slowing growth rate, India was still adding nearly 18 million people a year. The train is braking, but a braking train still travels a long way before it stops. Everything that comes next — the slowing births, the ageing — is momentum playing out.

## How many births are happening each year for every 1,000 Indians?

One way to watch that momentum drain away is the crude birth rate — the number of babies born each year for every 1,000 people. India's own Sample Registration System (SRS) puts it at 18.3 in 2024, down from 19.7 in 2019. It is a blunt instrument, because as a population ages the same number of births is spread over more grandparents and the rate falls for reasons that have nothing to do with families' choices. But it captures the flow of new life, and the flow is thinning.

Split it by where people live and the rural–urban divide from earlier snaps into focus: 20.2 births per 1,000 in the countryside against just 14.7 in the cities. That single gap is one of the central engines of India's demographic change. As more families move to town, the national figure falls almost mechanically. But the crude rate only counts heads; to understand the decision being made inside each family, you need a sharper measure.

## How many children does the average Indian woman have over her lifetime?

That sharper measure is the total fertility rate — the number of children a woman would have over her life if today's birth rates held at every age. And it tells perhaps the most profound story in modern Indian life. In 1960, the TFR was a towering 5.92 children per woman; that is what powered the population boom. By 2024 it had fallen to 1.96 — a drop of nearly four children per woman in a single lifetime.

Think about what that means at the level of an ordinary family: a grandmother who raised six children may have a granddaughter raising one or two. The decline was slow at first, then accelerated after the 1970s as family-planning programmes spread and girls stayed longer in school and gained more say over their own lives. A TFR below two signals a permanent turn toward small families. And yet — because of momentum — the population keeps climbing for decades even as the families inside it shrink. That number, 1.96, sits just under a line that demographers treat as a kind of threshold.

## Is India's fertility rate below the replacement level?

Yes — and it is worth understanding exactly what that does and does not mean. Replacement level is about 2.1 children per woman, the number needed to hold a population steady without migration. India's SRS puts the national TFR at 1.9 for 2024, below that line. But the national average is a fiction stitched from two very different realities: rural fertility sits right at replacement, 2.1, while urban fertility has fallen to a deep 1.5. The cities are pulling the country below the line; the villages are still, just barely, replacing themselves.

The crucial thing to hold onto is that below-replacement fertility does not mean the population starts shrinking tomorrow. Momentum keeps the number of births high for years yet. But the destination is now set — and the more urban India becomes, the further below replacement it will drift. So far we have spoken of "India" as one number. That is the convenient lie of a national average. Pull the map apart, and there is not one demographic India but many.

## How does fertility vary across India's states?

India is not a single demographic story; it is a continent of them, and the dividing line runs roughly north to south. A belt across the north and centre still has relatively high fertility: Bihar leads at a TFR of 2.7, with Meghalaya, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh at 2.2 and Rajasthan at 2.1. Travel south and east and the numbers collapse — Sikkim is at just 1.0, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at an astonishing 0.9, while Delhi and Punjab sit at 1.6.

This is not a statistical curiosity; it is the shape of the country's future. Some states are already at fertility levels that mean long-term decline, while others are still growing. The consequence is political and economic dynamite: the workers of tomorrow will increasingly be born in the poorer, higher-fertility states of the north, even as the richer southern states age and look elsewhere for labour. To see the spread at its sharpest, line the states up end to end.

## Which states have the highest and lowest fertility rates?

At the top of the league table, from the NFHS-6 survey of 2023–24, sits Bihar at 2.7, followed by Meghalaya, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh at 2.2 each, and Rajasthan at 2.1. At the very bottom: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at 0.9, Sikkim at 1.0, Arunachal Pradesh at 1.5, and Delhi and Punjab at 1.6.

The distance between top and bottom — 1.8 children per woman — is larger than the gap between many entire countries. It means India's demographic clock is set to different times in different places: some states will stop growing decades before others. Within each of those states, the same forces are at work, and the clearest way to see them is to ask not just how many children women have, but when, how, and under what circumstances they have them.

## At what age do Indian women have children?

Childbearing in India is now squeezed into a narrow window. The age-specific fertility rate peaks sharply at ages 25–29, with 134.7 births per 1,000 women, followed by ages 20–24 at 105.5 and 30–34 at 78.3. After 35 it falls away fast — 33 at 35–39, 11 at 40–44, and just 3.5 at 45–49. Teenage childbearing, at 15–19, is comparatively low at 10.9 per 1,000.

The shape of that curve is itself a cause of falling fertility. As marriage and first births shift later, women simply have fewer years in which to have children. And because so much of the action is concentrated in the 20-to-34 band, small shifts in when those women start their families move the whole national number. Which prompts the next question: are they, in fact, starting later?

## Are Indian women having children later in life?

They are, steadily. The mean age at childbearing was 25.48 years in 2000; the UN projects it will reach 30.49 by 2100 — about five years later over the course of the century. Behind that drift are more years of schooling, more women in paid work, and later marriage. Later motherhood tends to lower fertility on its own: the most fertile years slip by unused, and a woman who starts at 30 simply has less time and, often, different plans than one who started at 20.

There is a second, subtler effect. As each generation of mothers is older than the last, the gap between generations stretches out — and a longer gap between generations slows population growth even if family sizes never change. Of course, having children later only works if couples can reliably decide when not to have them, which turns the spotlight onto how India manages contraception — and onto who carries its weight.

## How do Indian families avoid pregnancy, and who bears the burden of contraception?

Most married couples now do plan their families: the NFHS-6 survey for 2023–24 reports that 52.7% of married women aged 15–49 use a modern method. But a single statistic hides an uncomfortable imbalance. Female sterilisation alone accounts for 36.5% of all contraception, while male sterilisation is a vanishing 0.5%. In other words, the work of preventing pregnancy falls almost entirely on women — and usually through a permanent, irreversible procedure rather than a reversible method men might share.

The unmet need for family planning — women who want to avoid pregnancy but use nothing — stands at 8.5%, low by historical standards yet still millions of women. The lopsided reliance on female sterilisation is the fingerprint of how India delivered family planning for decades: a one-time operation, performed on women, usually after they had already had the children they wanted. It is an efficient way to bring fertility down. It is also a quiet statement about whose body bears the cost. The clearest sign that this whole apparatus has worked shows up in how many children families now actually have.

## Are Indian families getting smaller?

Dramatically — and the cleanest proof is in birth order. In 2024, according to the SRS, 66.4% of all live births were first children and another 22.7% were second children. Third children made up just 7.3%, and fourth-or-higher births a mere 3.5%. A generation ago, large families with three, four or more children were ordinary; today they have nearly disappeared from the statistics.

The two-child family is now the firm Indian norm, and the one-child family is rising fast — that towering share of first births reflects, in part, couples choosing to stop at one. The pattern holds in villages and cities alike, though rural families still tip slightly toward higher birth orders. This is the small-family revolution rendered as arithmetic. But averages can hide hard edges, and at those edges some girls are still becoming wives and mothers far too young.

## How common are child marriage and teenage motherhood in India?

For all the progress, early marriage has not vanished. The NFHS-6 survey found that 20.1% of women aged 20–24 were married before they turned 18 — one in five. Among girls aged 15–19, 6.7% were already mothers or pregnant when surveyed. Both numbers have fallen over the past decade, but neither is small.

These are not just social statistics; they feed straight back into the demography. Girls who marry young tend to start having children sooner and have more of them over a lifetime, nudging fertility upward exactly in the poorer, rural states where it is already highest. Child marriage is illegal and in retreat, but where it persists it locks girls out of school and work and into a cycle that is hard to break. That link between a girl's schooling and her family size is no accident — it is, in fact, the single strongest lever on fertility in the country.

## How does fertility change with a woman's education level?

If you could change just one thing to change India's demographic future, it would be this. Data from NFHS-5 (2019–21) shows fertility falling in a clean staircase as schooling rises: women with no schooling had a TFR of 2.82; with under five years, 2.3; with five to seven years, 2.21; with eight to nine, 2.12; with ten to eleven, 1.88; and with twelve or more years, 1.78. A woman who finishes high school has, on average, a full child fewer than a woman who never went to school.

The relationship holds across regions and communities because education is not really one lever but a bundle of them: it delays marriage, raises aspirations, and hands women genuine control over their own reproductive lives. As girls' schooling expands, fertility will keep falling. (One note on sourcing: the latest NFHS-6 round does not yet break fertility down this way, so these cuts come from the previous survey.) And schooling rarely travels alone — it moves in step with money, which carves an almost identical pattern.

## How does fertility change with household wealth?

The income gradient is just as steep. NFHS-5 shows the TFR sliding from 2.63 among the poorest fifth of households to 2.12 in the next, 1.89 in the middle, 1.74 in the fourth, and 1.57 among the richest fifth. A woman in the poorest household has, on average, a child more than one in the richest.

It would be a mistake to read education and wealth as two separate causes — they are two readings of the same underlying thing, advantage. As more families climb the income ladder, fertility will keep dropping. But the poorest remain above replacement for reasons that are coldly rational where children are extra hands and the only pension you will ever have. That dual reality carries a practical lesson: schooling and health spending aimed squarely at the poorest would speed the fertility decline precisely where it still has the furthest to fall. Which brings us to the cut everyone argues about, and almost everyone misreads.

## How does fertility vary by religious group?

This is the most politically charged demographic question in India, and the most widely misunderstood. NFHS-5 data puts the TFR for Muslims at 2.36, Hindus at 1.94, Christians at 1.88, Sikhs at 1.61, Buddhists and Neo-Buddhists at 1.39, and Jains at 1.6. Two facts cut through the noise. First, every single group is below 2.5, and every one is falling. Second, the Muslim rate — though the highest — has dropped the fastest of all, from above four children per woman a few decades ago to 2.36 today.

The gaps between groups are not widening; they are closing. No community is immune to the forces — education, urbanisation, rising incomes — that pull fertility down, and the differences that remain mostly track how far along that shared road each group happens to be. The popular fear of a demographic "takeover" reads the numbers exactly backwards: the real story is a single national decline that every group is part of. There is, however, one number where son preference still leaves an ugly mark.

## What is India's sex ratio at birth, and what does it reveal about son preference?

For every 1,000 boys born in India in 2022–24, there were 918 girls, according to the SRS — up from 907 in 2018–20. The improvement is real, but so is the deficit: nature delivers around 950 girls per 1,000 boys, and the shortfall between that and 918 is the statistical shadow of a long preference for sons and the sex-selective practices that came with it. Curiously, cities do slightly better than villages — 928 against 914 — perhaps a sign of tighter enforcement and shifting attitudes among more-educated families.

The trend is upward, but it is fragile, and small families make it more so: when a couple plans to have only one or two children, the pressure to ensure at least one is a son can intensify rather than ease. This is the point in the story where demography stops being about counting and starts being about values. And it is also where the narrative turns — away from how many Indians are being born, and toward what is happening to the enormous generations already here as they age.

## What does India's age pyramid look like today?

Picture the population as a stack of bars, youngest at the bottom — and you get a pyramid that is just beginning to lose its shape. The UN projection for 2030 shows the largest single group is no longer the youngest but the 25-to-29-year-olds, at about 12.9 crore. Below them the base is narrowing: the 0-to-4 group in 2030 is 11.1 crore, smaller than the bulge of twenty-somethings above it. In 2000, that base was much wider; new births kept piling onto an ever-broadening foundation.

Now the foundation is shrinking. The pyramid is still recognisably a triangle — India is still a young country — but its sides are sloping inward and its bottom is squaring off, the tell-tale sign that each generation is smaller than the last. This single shape explains the momentum we keep returning to: that vast bulge in its twenties and thirties will go on having children for years, but their children will be fewer. Compress that picture into a few headline numbers and the shift becomes impossible to miss.

## How is India's age mix changing over time?

Split the population into three groups — children, workers and the elderly — and watch them trade places over sixty years. In 1960, children under 15 were 40.6% of all Indians; by 2024 they had fallen to 24.6%. Over the same span the working-age share (15–64) swelled from 56.1% to 68.2%, a historic expansion, while the elderly (65 and over) edged up from 3.3% to 7.1%.

That bulging middle is the celebrated "demographic dividend" — a rare window when a huge share of the population is of working age and dependents are few. But it is exactly that: a window. As the enormous working-age cohort marches toward retirement, the elderly share will climb steeply and the child share will keep shrinking. India is moving from a pyramid to a pillar, and one day to an inverted pyramid. The whole challenge of the coming decades is to convert these dividend years into the wealth and institutions an older India will need — a race you can read directly off the country's rising median age.

## What is India's median age, and how fast is it rising?

The median age is the line that splits the country into a younger and an older half, and it is climbing fast. In 2000 it was just 21.2 years; the UN's central projection has it reaching 47.8 by 2100 — more than doubling over the century. Today India is unmistakably young. It will not stay that way.

Two forces drive the rise at once. As fewer children are born, the population ages from the bottom; as people live longer, it ages from the top. India is doing both, and doing them faster than almost any other large country has. Within a few decades it will be older than it is now and older than many societies we currently think of as "ageing." The question, then, is not whether India grows old — that is settled — but how fast, and how each worker will carry the weight of those who can no longer work.

## How many older adults does each working-age Indian support?

The old-age dependency ratio counts how many people aged 65 and over there are for every 100 of working age. In 2030 it is projected at 12.4 — about twelve seniors for every hundred workers. That sounds manageable, and for now it is. But the ratio is set to more than triple by the end of the century, and it is rising not because the old are suddenly multiplying but because the working-age group below them is growing more and more slowly.

The burden is not only money — pensions, hospitals, a state being asked for support it may struggle to afford. It is also care. In a country where the family has always been the real social-security system, more elderly relatives means more households caught between raising children and tending parents at the same time. This is one of the slowest-moving and most certain facts about India's future, and it is driven, paradoxically, by one of its proudest achievements: people simply do not die as young as they used to.

## How long do Indians live today?

Life expectancy at birth has very nearly doubled since 1960. Back then, the average Indian could expect 45.6 years; by 2024 that had reached 72.2. This is one of the great public-health victories of the modern age — cleaner water, vaccines, better food, basic medicine — and it deserves to be named as such before we count its costs.

But longevity is the second engine of ageing, alongside falling fertility. Every year added to life pushes more people into old age and keeps them there longer. The early gains came mostly from saving children who once died young; the gains now increasingly come at the other end of life. The frontier challenge is no longer simply living longer but living those extra years in good health. And like every average in this article, 72.2 conceals deep gaps — between rich and poor, town and country, women and men. Still, the trend is unmistakable, and it feeds directly into the share of Indians who are now old.

## What share of India's population is aged 65 and older?

In 1960, just 3.3% of Indians were 65 or older. By 2024 that had more than doubled to 7.1%. Next to the rich world, where the figure runs above 20%, that still looks modest — but it is the rate of change that matters, and it is about to accelerate as the large cohorts born in the 1960s and 1970s reach old age.

A rising elderly share is not a problem of numbers alone; it is a problem of ratios. Even as the total population keeps growing, a larger slice of old means a relatively smaller slice of working-age Indians to support them. The dependency burden, which for a century rested on the shoulders of raising children, is beginning to swing toward the old — a historic reversal in who a society spends its resources on. And it lands on India with one particularly uncomfortable twist of timing.

## How wealthy is India as it gets older?

Here is the twist, and it is the one that should keep policymakers up at night. GDP per capita — a rough gauge of average income — was just US$85 in 1960. By 2024 it had grown to US$2,695: thirty times higher, and still strikingly low by world standards. When today's rich countries reached the elderly shares India is now approaching, their citizens earned the equivalent of $20,000 to $40,000 a head. India is growing old at a small fraction of that income.

This is the "old before rich" problem in a single comparison. A poorer society has thinner means to build the pensions, hospitals and care systems an ageing population demands. And remember that GDP per capita is only an average — most Indians earn far less than $2,695 — so the real capacity of a typical family to support its elders is thinner still. As the dependency ratio climbs, income per worker will have to grow much faster just to keep the country's grandparents out of poverty. Whether India manages that race depends on how the population's final act actually unfolds.

## When will India's population stop growing, and how high will it peak?

The UN's central projection has India's population peaking around 2061 at roughly 170 crore, then beginning a gentle descent to about 150.5 crore by 2100 — still larger than today. That peak is not a prophecy; it is a central estimate, and its exact year and height hinge on how quickly fertility keeps falling. But the broad shape is now widely agreed: India crests in the second half of this century and then, for the first time in its modern history, starts to shrink.

It is hard to overstate what a break that is. For as long as anyone alive can remember, the Indian story has been one of more — more people, more pressure, more growth. The peak marks the moment the momentum we have traced through this whole article finally exhausts itself and the country begins to age in absolute numbers, not just in proportions. How sharp the descent afterwards depends almost entirely on a single assumption about the future.

## How different fertility assumptions change India's population projection?

The UN does not offer one future but a fan of them, and the spread is enormous. Hold fertility high and India reaches a vast 219.7 crore by 2100; let it fall low and the country drops to 99.1 crore. The central, median path lands at 150.5 crore. Freeze fertility exactly where it is today and you get 176.0 crore; snap it instantly to replacement level and you get 195.9 crore.

That is a range of well over 100 crore people, hanging on choices not yet made. The high scenario means another full century of growth; the low one means rapid decline within living memory. The truth almost certainly sits somewhere between. The real message is liberating rather than ominous: fertility is not destiny but a dial, one that schooling, healthcare, jobs and the status of women can still turn. And precisely because so much rests on that dial, even the experts who model it for a living do not agree on where it will settle.

## Why do different population models disagree on the peak?

The UN is not the only forecaster, and its rivals tell a starker tale. In 2020 the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published a reference scenario in which India peaks much earlier — around 2048, at about 161 crore — and then falls steeply to 109.3 crore by 2100. Where the UN sees a gentle slope down, IHME sees a cliff.

The disagreement comes down to one assumption: IHME expects fertility to keep falling well below a TFR of 1.5, a depth the UN's central projection does not build in. That single difference reshapes the entire second half of the century. It is the clearest possible reminder that population projections are not predictions but conditional bets — *if* fertility does this, *then* the population does that. The two models agree on the shape of India's future: a peak, then a decline. What they cannot agree on is when it comes and how far it falls — and that uncertainty, more than any single number in this article, is the honest last word on where India's population is heading.


## Sources

- World Bank: total population, fertility rate, urban share, age shares, life expectancy, GDP per capita.
- UN WPP 2024: population projections, growth rates, median age, old-age dependency ratio, mean age at childbearing, age-sex structure.
- Sample Registration System (SRS) 2024: crude birth rates, total fertility rates, age-specific fertility rates, birth order, sex ratio at birth.
- NFHS-6 (2023-24): contraceptive use, sterilization, unmet need, teen motherhood, child marriage, state fertility rates.
- NFHS-5 (2019-21): fertility by education, wealth, and religion.
- IHME (Vollset et al., 2020): alternative population projection.

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Source: [This Indian Life](https://thisindianlife.today/articles/population-of-india/) · Updated 2026-06-05. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Please cite as "This Indian Life — https://thisindianlife.today".