Baby Aastha's birth brings India's population to billion

India yesterday became the world's second country after China whose population reached the billion mark. Aastha, a baby girl (shown above with her mother), born in a New Delhi hospital at 12.44 p.m. local time symbolically marked this population milestone which, according to the United Nations, India had already crossed last August.

Every sixth person in the world is an Indian. India also adds more than 1,800 people to its population every hour or nearly 17 million each year, a figure equalling Australia's total population. Demographers said India is likely to overtake China's population of 1.26 billion by 2025 to become the world's most populous nation.

But population experts said the billionth birth was not an event to celebrate. "Places are crowded and congested and yet we do not seem to understand the gravity of the population problem," said an official from the census commissioner's office.

Officials said that by 2001 the federal capital, New Delhi, with more than 14 million residents would be an overcrowded slum buried under rubbish, unless immediate measures to contain pollution, overcrowding, crime and traffic chaos were not implemented.

"If the current pressure of population on Delhi continues, India's capital will have to be shifted elsewhere by 2005," the city's former chief executive councillor, Mr Jag Pravesh Chandra, said. Describing the population crisis as "serious" the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said it was apparent that family welfare programmes had failed over the past decade, seriously hampering India's progress. Food, water and housing resources, he declared, were stretched to the maximum and he called for population control to become a national movement and responsibility.

Experts said population control policies needed swift implementation in the "cow belt" states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar where more than 40 per cent of Indians live. If Uttar Pradesh, with a population of more than 157 million were independent, it would be the world's fifth most populous country.