World’s largest population: Will India gain or lose?

[Nataliia Shulga/Al Jazeera]

For decades, India ran family planning programmes aimed at curbing its population growth amid limited resources.

Then, as the Indian economy took off after liberalisation in the 1990s, the country’s policymakers changed tack: The country’s vast, young labour pool, New Delhi argued, was a “demographic dividend” that would pay out handsomely for the Indian economy.