As reported by Bloomberg, at the end of 2022, India’s population stood at 1.417 billion, based on U.N. projections, while according to data recently released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, its population at the end of 2022 was slightly less than 1.412 billion, a decrease from how many people it had in 2021. India now has 5 million more people than China.

It is almost certainly true that India now has more people than China, something that was projected to have anyhow occurred sometime during this year. In fact, it is possible that India overtook China sometime last year.

India’s population has consistently been undercounted. For example, India’s last census, held in 2011, missed 27.85 million people. On the other hand, China has obfuscated its population decline for many years. Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Time magazine that “China’s population began to decline 9-10 years earlier than Chinese officials and U.N. projections, meaning that China’s real demographic crisis is beyond imagination….”

India becoming the most populous country in the world is hardly surprising. South Asia as a whole has already had a larger population — around 1.8 billion people — than China for at least a dozen years; had the erstwhile British Raj not been divided into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, undivided India’s population would have already exceeded China’s.