World Population Day 2025: Interesting Stats You Need to Know
History of World Population Day
The day was first celebrated by the United Nations in 1989. It was inspired by 'Five Billion Day' on 11 July 1987, when the world population reached 5 billion.
A World Bank demographer, Dr. KC Zachariah, first suggested the idea for World Population Day after this milestone.
Significance
World Population Day brings attention to issues like:
Population growth
Maternal and child health
Family planning
Reproductive rights
Access to education and healthcare
Gender equality and youth empowerment
Theme for 2025
"Empowering young people to create the families they want in a fair and hopeful world."
Top 10 Most Populated Countries in 2025
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
33 minutes ago
- Time of India
Nat'l contest for kids to design UN 80th anniv postage stamp
Lucknow: The department of post is organising a national stamp design competition to mark the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, inviting students to share their art and ideas for the commemorative postage stamp. The theme of the competition is 'UN@80 and India's leadership in building our future through multilateralism, global leadership, and stewardship'. The contest is open to students of Classes 9 to 12 from recognised art colleges, schools affiliated with CBSE, state boards, Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, said an official. He said entries must be created on A4 size (200 GSM white) sheets using suitable colouring materials. Each school/college may submit a maximum of five shortlisted entries to Lucknow GPO. The top five shortlisted entries are to be uploaded on the MyGov Portal by the respective institutions. Live submissions on the MyGov Portal start from 10am to 5pm and can be done until Aug 15.
Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
In the demographic dividend conversation, India must include its villages
Written by Aliva Das India's villages are not the margins, they are the makers of our demographic future. With over 65 per cent of our population still living in rural areas, any conversation on population development must begin here. The idea of 'population justice', ensuring fairness and rights in how we understand and respond to demographic realities, demands that we listen to rural communities not as data points but as co-authors of India's next chapter. This year's World Population Day theme, empowering young people to create the families they want in a fair and hopeful world, is especially relevant. With 1.8 billion young people globally, the largest cohort in human history, India alone accounts for around 356 million in that age group (roughly 20 per cent share), making it the world's largest youth population. Nearly 40 per cent of India's own population is under 25 (over 65 per cent resides in rural India), significantly higher than many other countries. In our work across tribal and remote geographies, we meet young women who are returning to education through bridge programmes, stepping up as gender champions. Village institutions like panchayats are starting to talk about menstrual health, migration safety, and digital skilling. These changes are subtle but compelling. Yet, rural young people face systemic gaps. Gendered roles and norms continue to limit opportunities, girls have to bear the burden of care-giving from a young age, mobility is restricted, and decision-making spaces rarely include young women's voices. Similarly, they face layered barriers to economic participation, like limited access to assets and also a lack of childcare. Climate change has added new uncertainties, from crop failures to displacement, especially for rural workers and marginal farmers. Despite the digital push, rural communities still struggle with digital literacy, especially among women and the elderly. These are not peripheral issues. They are central to any policy that hopes to be future-ready and people-first. We often hear of India's 'demographic dividend' but the real dividend lies in dignity, not just in numbers. When a young person completes their education, when a farmer adapts to climate risks through locality compacts, and when a village includes youth voices in its planning, it signals more than local progress. It reflects the renewal of the nation's promise. To reclaim rural India in the population conversation, we need more than schemes: We need a rural-first approach to population policy that puts the people and their dignity at the centre. This begins with participatory planning, where village institutions, SHGs, and panchayats are empowered to shape decisions around the developmental needs of the locals. It demands decentralised delivery, where access to services and entitlements reaches the very last home, not as an exception, but as the norm. Gender equity must be embedded across all efforts, not as an add-on, but as a core commitment. From empowering women leaders in panchayats to unlocking opportunities for the rural youth, these efforts reflect a quiet but powerful shift taking root across India's villages. Change is no longer something being brought in from the outside, it is being shaped from within, by communities asserting their rights, reimagining local governance, and building pathways to dignity and opportunity. As we move towards the next Census, we must look beyond data points to the lived experiences already unfolding on the ground. It's time to reframe the population narrative, not in terms of fear or control, but through trust in rural India's aspirations and agency. Demography is not destiny, but dignity must be. And that dignity begins where most of India lives: In its villages. The writer is an associate director at Transform Rural India (TRI)
Indian Express
6 days ago
- Indian Express
Where humanity ends in Palestine, a writer offers his library in exchange for food
Asentence is not a loaf of bread, releasing steam as it is torn apart and dipped into fresh olive oil and zaatar. A beautiful metaphor offers little where the fragrance of a fresh meal is in danger of becoming a memory, and even the coldest can of beans does more for a hungry stomach than any word in any language can. And so, Omar Hamad — pharmacist, tailor, writer and eyewitness to the death and starvation in Gaza — shares an appeal on social media, offering his library in exchange for a sack of flour. Because what place do books have in a land where access to food is now wielded like a weapon? 'I once plucked roses from language,' Hamad recalls in a short essay on LitHub. But even for a writer, books can qualify as a necessity only when the sharp edge of hunger is sheathed — not when there are mouths to feed, wounds to salve, bodies to count. Twenty-one months of conflict have made Gaza, as United Nations officials have reported, 'the hungriest place on Earth'. From rice to lentils to baby formula, even the most staple of foods have been made scarce by Israeli blockades and reports emerge every day of desperate, hungry people being crushed to death by others who are just as famished and just as desperate, begging for relief at aid hubs. This is the double tragedy of Gaza where, for millennia, olive trees and poetry grew in equal profusion. Literature may be immortal, but for an entire population that faces starvation, books, too, have been reduced to mere possessions, emergency currency to be exchanged for food. The cultural devastation of Gaza since October 2023 is heartbreaking, with libraries, museums and ancient cultural sites destroyed by bombing. But as hunger stalks through the Strip, there will come a time when the world must reckon with a greater, incalculable loss.
