Yogi, BJP leaders say population control must go ahead but sans any imbalance 

With a United Nations (UN) report projecting that India will surpass China as the most populous nation by 2023, there was a clamour for undertaking population control measures in the country. Soon after, Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said the population control programme must go ahead successfully but at the same time “population imbalance” should not be allowed to happen.

BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi said this issue is not merely his party’s but that of every aware citizen of India.

The World Population Prospects 2022 by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division report has projected that India will have a population of 1.668 billion in 2050, way ahead of China’s 1.317 billion people by the middle of the century. India’s population stands at 1.412 billion today as compared to China’s 1.426 billion.

The world’s two most populous regions in 2022 were Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, with 2.3 billion people, representing 29 per cent of the global population, and Central and Southern Asia, with 2.1 billion, representing 26 per cent of the total world population.

The report suggests that the world’s population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030.

It would grow further to 9.7 billion in 2050. The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under one per cent in 2020. The report added that it is estimated that ten countries experienced a net outflow of more than one million migrants between 2010 and 2021. In many of these countries, these outflows were due to temporary labour movements, such as for Pakistan (net outflow of -16.5 million during 2010-2021), India (-3.5 million), Bangladesh (-2.9 million), Nepal (-1.6 million) and Sri Lanka (-1 million).

Later, speaking at a function to mark the commencement of ‘population control fortnight’, Yogi Adityanath said, “When we talk about family planning/population stabilisation, we have to keep in mind that the population control programme must go ahead successfully, but at the same time, a situation of population imbalance should not be allowed to happen.”

He said programmes pertaining to awareness of population stabilisation have been running for the past five decades. “On one scale, population is an achievement of the society, but this will remain an achievement only when society remains healthy and disease-free,’’ he added.BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi said this issue is not merely his party’s but that of every aware citizen of India. “Definitely, from the common man to political parties, which should rise above partisan politics, everyone should move in the right direction on the issue,” he said.

While Trivedi did not refer to the demands by some groups for a law to curb population growth, senior party leader and Union Minister Giriraj Singh, who has been a vocal supporter of such legislative measures, favoured a stringent law.

 The “demon” of rising population is preventing the country from becoming “vishwa guru” (world leader), he said in a tweet, suggesting that China has left India behind on development metrics due to its success in controlling its population.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also flagged the issue in the past. In his Independence Day speech in 2019, he expressed concern over the “population explosion” in the country, saying it causes innumerable challenges for the coming generations.

The Union Health Ministry had recently discounted the possibility of law, saying the awareness campaign for checking the population