NEW DELHI: India is poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation, but it is third from the bottom on most development indicators among 10 most populous countries, with only Pakistan and Nigeria consistently below it. In fact, when it comes to sex ratio at birth, India is second from the bottom with just China recording a worse gender skew.
Bangladesh performs better than India on most parameters tracked by the UN’s World Population Prospects 2022, but is worse in one of them. Only one of the ten, the US, is a developed economy while four others — Russia, Brazil, Mexico and China — are categorised by the UN as upper middle-income. The rest are all in the lower middle-income bracket.
