World Population Day 2025: Know Date, Theme, History And Significance
World Population Day 2025: History
World Population Day was established by the UN and first observed in 1989. The idea was inspired by the world population reaching five billion on July 11, 1987, prompting Dr KC Zachariah, a senior demographer at the World Bank, to suggest marking the occasion as World Population Day.
Since then, World Population Day has played a crucial role in raising awareness, advocating for reproductive rights, and encouraging policies and programs that support sustainable development and the well-being of all individuals.
World Population Day 2025: Significance
The significance of World Population Day lies in its ability to foster discussions and raise awareness about the impact of population dynamics on socio-economic development, environmental sustainability, and individual well-being. It serves as a reminder that our growing population presents both challenges and opportunities that require our attention and proactive measures.
World Population Day 2025: Theme
The theme for World Population Day 2025 is "Empowering young people to create the families they want in a fair and hopeful world". This theme reaffirms the promise of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development: that every person has the right to make informed choices about their lives and futures, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
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Scroll.in
21 hours ago
- Scroll.in
Five years to go, India's climate action SDGs show worsening trend
For the first time, India entered the top 100 countries in the annual Sustainable Development Report, which assesses progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs. India ranked 99th out of 167 nations in the 2025 report, up from 109 in 2024 and 112 in 2023, but the data reveals that sustainability challenges remain, especially in relation to environmental goals. This year's report shows that only one-third of India's SDG targets, meant to be achieved by 2030, are 'on track', while there is limited progress on others with some even slipping backwards. India is firmly on track with progress on two of the 17 SDG goals, No Poverty (SDG 1) and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10). Progress on others, including Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure (SDG 9), Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), and Life on Land (SDG 15), is stagnating. Other goals, such as Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7) and Life Below Water (SDG 14), are showing moderate improvement. Most concerning is Climate Action (SDG 13), which shows a worsening trend, indicating that India's efforts to take action to combat climate change and its impacts are not improving. The scores signal that without a dramatic policy shift and vigorous implementation, India risks falling short of the 20230 target to achieve the SDG goals. The annual report, released since 2016 is prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network which operates under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General, to drive action on the SDGs. Water stress and coal National statistics paint a rosy picture. India boasts nearly universal electrification, clean cooking, and safe sanitation. For instance, 80% of rural households now have an improved drinking-water source through tap water, 100% have access to electricity, and 85% use clean cooking fuel. Yet global assessments remain cautious. The 2025 report flags India's performance on Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6) as only 'moderately improving,' citing unsustainable freshwater withdrawals and the hidden toll of water‐intensive imports. Venkatesh Dutta, a professor at School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, points out that 'we have not progressed much on water circularity', meaning the water the country pulls out isn't being reused by industry, and overall, freshwater withdrawals keep rising. He warns that India's focus needs to shift to resource sustainability. 'Nobody is talking about resource sustainability. Your freshwater is being obstructed and it is not being returned back to nature in the state in which you took it,' he says, indicating that the country must think about what happens to water after industries use it. Dutta adds that industrial growth often concentrates in areas already short on water, so policy must ensure that after use – especially in big clusters like power plants – water is cleaned and reused. 'Water has to be reused,' he says, suggesting rules that force industries to use treated wastewater for cooling and other needs. But at the current pace, he warns, 'we are not going to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030'. India's progress towards Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 7, paints a similar picture, with the report noting that the country's score on this SDG is moderately improving but insufficient to attain the goal. Access to power is nearly universal, and renewable energy capacity is expanding rapidly, yet the energy mix in India is still dominated by coal, and carbon emissions remain high. Without a faster shift to green energy, this goal will remain off track. 'We've achieved almost 100% electrification in terms of connections, but coal still provides over 70% of the electricity that flows through the grid. Renewables account for around 45% of the installed capacity, yet their share has hovered around 22%-24% in recent years in terms of actual generation. We expect coal's share to fall below 50% by 2030 as renewable capacity further expands, ' says Debajit Palit, Centre Head at the Centre for Climate Change and Energy Transition, Chintan Research Foundation. 'In absolute terms, though India ranks among the top five carbon emitters globally, yet our per-capita emissions remain extremely low. Over the last decade, our economy has grown at around 6.5 to 8% annually, while our carbon emissions have risen at only about 4%, showing we're improving the carbon intensity of our growth,' says Palit. He also highlights the issue related to clean cooking fuel. 'LPG has helped expand clean-cooking access, but it is still a fossil fuel. The real goal is electric cooking, powered by a greener grid. This shift won't happen overnight, but we're on the right path,' notes Palit. Sustainability falters India is witnessing rapid urbanisation and the challenges that come with it have been documented in several reports, including the recent SDG report. It assesses India's performance on Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11) using four indicators – the proportion of urban population living in slums, air pollution, access to improved water source, and public transport. Except for the access to public transport, performance on the other three indicators is either stagnant or worsening. Nearly one in four urban Indians still lives in slums or informal settlements. Air pollution also remains severe, and this is corroborated by other reports such as a recent World Bank study that found that all of India's 1.4 billion people – 100% of the country's population – are exposed to outdoor air pollution above World Health Organization safety limits. Reducing PM 2.5 pollution and upgrading water and housing for urban dwellers must become urgent policy priorities, says Palit. He adds that air pollution sources are deeply embedded within city systems, from vehicular emissions, construction dust, and small-scale industries, to poorly enforced environmental regulations. 'We need a more holistic, comprehensive reform and continuous monitoring of vehicles, industries, and construction,' he says, adding that 'our enforcement is very weak.' Citing the example of Delhi, Palit notes that despite bans on older vehicles, 95% of fitness checks are still conducted manually, making it difficult to track real-time particulate emissions. He argues for a shift toward a 'data-centric enforcement model' that can accurately monitor and regulate polluters. Moreover, shifting polluting industries from city peripheries, such as Noida or Faridabad, faces political and economic resistance. 'The government needs to create an incentive mechanism to enable this shift,' he says. Performance on Responsible Consumption and Production, SDG 12, also remains a critical concern. While India's economic expansion has lifted millions out of poverty, it has also driven up resource extraction and pollution. Production-based air and nitrogen emissions continue to exceed safe limits, even as municipal solid-waste collection and e-waste recycling show modest improvement. Climate and biodiversity According to the Sustainable Development Report, India's efforts towards Climate Action, SDG13, are 'decreasing, with challenges', especially with emissions from the combustion and oxidation of fossil fuels and from cement production increasing. India has pledged expansion of solar and wind energy and participates actively in international climate talks; however, its greenhouse gas emissions are rising as it develops. India's per capita carbon dioxide emissions from fuel and cement are still substantial (the country now emits more CO₂ in total than any nation except China and the US). Major challenges remain in India's efforts to protect Life Below Water, SDG 14, and Life on Land, SDG 15, notes the report. Marine biodiversity protections and fish stock management show limited progress. Fishing practices, such as trawling, are putting ocean life under strain. On land, deforestation, soil degradation, and habitat loss pose a significant risk to India's biodiversity and forest cover. Conservation programs exist, but they cannot keep up with the pace of habitat destruction. India's rise to 99th place is a milestone, but without swift and enforceable action on water, energy, and pollution, this achievement risks being undone.
The Wire
a day ago
- The Wire
Using False Statistics to Claim 'Zero Poverty' Helps Nobody
Excerpted from Utsa Patnaik, Exploring the Poverty Question, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2025. The media have been full of claims by the World Bank and by individual governments that in the global South, 'millions of people had been lifted out of poverty' during the last four decades. India, by now the most populous country in the world, claimed that by 2022–23 only 5 per cent of its population was poor. The data on nutritional intake in India however show that hunger rose greatly for both rural and urban populations during the same period, while its very low ranking on the global hunger index worsened further. Even educated citizens believe the official claims and say, 'how can hunger have increased when poverty has declined?' The question however should be the other way round, namely, 'how can poverty have declined when hunger has increased?' The information on increase in hunger is far more direct and based on readily verifiable statistics, than are the official calculations of poverty. The latter are indirect and use certain calculation procedures – very strange and illogical ones as my book argues – to derive the results on which claims of poverty decline are based It was not always the case that illogical statistical procedures were used. Initially in every country using consumer expenditure surveys, the 'poverty line' was ascertained as the currently observed actual spending level per head at which the accepted nutrition norm was satisfied. The problem arose because for every subsequent estimate in every country, this definition of the poverty line was quietly abandoned; the nutrition norm was no longer applied to determine the correct current poverty line, and instead the original poverty line was simply updated to later years using a consumer price index. This meant holding unchanged for many decades, the particular basket of goods and services consumed in the original 'base year', which in India is over five decades in the past. This is a fundamentally illogical method. We cannot adopt one definition of poverty line directly derived from nutritional intake in one year, term it the initial base year and then for later years switch to a completely different definition of the poverty line that is no longer directly linked to nutrition (even though current data on nutrition are available) but simply applies a price index to the base year line. This procedure embodies a fallacy, a mistake in reasoning. Logicians call it a 'fallacy of equivocation' where the same term – in this case, 'poverty line' – is improperly used with two completely different meanings in the course of an argument. This fallacy has been routinely committed by governments and by the World Bank, not once or twice but repeatedly over many decades. We show that their poverty lines have ended up being cumulatively underestimated and have given access to lower and lower nutritional intake. The poor have been counted below a declining, not a constant standard over many decades, until the ultimate absurdity has been reached by now, when the official poverty lines are so low that they no longer permit human survival. Zero or very few observations because there are no survivors or hardly any survivors, is then perversely interpreted as zero poverty or very low poverty. Utsa Patnaik Exploring the Poverty Question Tulika Books, 2025 In the present study I have applied the original nutrition-based definition of poverty line, for the first time in the literature, to the basic data available in India from every five-yearly large sample survey carried out by the NSSO starting from 1978, with a more detailed treatment for the years from 1993-4 onwards. These true, nutrition- based poverty lines show rapid upward divergence from the official poverty lines especially during the period of neo-liberal reforms. At the All-India level the proportion of rural/urban persons unable to reach initial official nutrition norms of 2200/2100 daily calorie intake, rose from 56.4/49.2 percent during 1973-4 to 58.5/56 percent by 1993-4 and thereafter rose faster by 2011-12 to 67/62 percent. The nutritional intake data for 2017-18 have not been made directly available, but reasonable estimates based on 'leaked data' show a peaking of rural deprivation with 80 percent unable to reach the nutrition norm. Thereafter the government has changed the method of data collection. The official price indexation of a base year poverty line means applying a Laspeyres index, that is, it takes a fixed and unchanged consumption basket with respect to items and quantities consumed, for a base year that has receded into the distant past. But it is precisely the change in the initially available basket of goods that decides whether people remain poor, get poorer or get better off. Historically, poverty was reduced greatly or eliminated entirely by state policies in those countries where health care, education, and to a large extent housing and utilities were removed from the sphere of market pricing, and were treated as subsidized public goods. Thereby a large share of the average family budget could be devoted to purchasing food, manufactured necessities and on recreational activities. Such measures were not only typical in the socialist countries in Asia and in socialist economies in Europe as long as they existed, but were also undertaken after World War II in almost all the West European capitalist countries. The converse happened, the available basket of goods and services changed drastically with the introduction of neo-liberal market-oriented and export-oriented economic reforms in countries of the global South, starting in the 1990s in India and at varying dates elsewhere. These measures substantially removed health care, education and utilities from the category of public goods and into that of higher-cost market pricing. The small minority of the well-to-do were unaffected and in fact gained greatly from these reforms, but the income available to the majority of the population was reduced for basic spending on food and manufactured necessities. It was argued by some that the prolonged fall in per capita cereal intake in India was nothing to worry about because with rise in per capita income it was only to be expected that people would diversify diets to superior foods. What they miss is that the data relate not just to the direct intake of foodgrains but to direct and indirect intake, the latter via animal products and processed foods. This total intake is invariably found to rise with real income, all over the world. The three decades of neo-liberal reforms in India however have seen a well-documented decline in real spending per capita on food, while from 2011 onwards we see a decline in real spending per capita on all goods and services. The nutritional intake data show a decline not only in energy intake per capita measured in kilocalories per day, but also in per capita protein intake per day. In short, poverty has risen substantially over the last three decades. China's recent assertion of achieving zero extreme poverty, was preceded years earlier by similar claims for many parts of India. The point, however, is that there cannot possibly be any observations of persons below official poverty lines measuring extreme poverty, for these official poverty lines are so low that at these poverty lines, people can no longer physically survive. This observation applies to China as well for reasons discussed in the book. The daily poverty line for all spending needs, both food, non-food and services, for rural/urban India in 2022-23, at which the Niti Aayog claimed that only 5 percent of the population was poor, were Rs.59/69, sums which would allow at most 3/3.5 litres of water to be bought. The poor do not actually buy packaged water; the example is to show just how meagre the poverty line is. The current official claim that only 2 percent of the population is in poverty arises from further indexation and lowering of the nutrition accessible, so that there are hardly any survivors. By delinking the estimation procedure from the nutrition norm, the very concept of poverty-line was violated, to a greater extent every time. For example, the 2011 official rural poverty ratios in in Goa and Gujarat were 6.8 percent and 21.5 per cent respectively, but at the poverty lines producing these ratios, only 1570 calories and 1668 calories could be accessed daily. The actual populations in poverty, unable to reach the 2200 calories norm, were 81.5 percent and 87 percent respectively. Not a single publication whether by the Planning Commission (now Niti Aayog) or by the World Bank, or by individual academics using the official procedure, ever mentions the blatantly obvious fact of sharply declining nutritional intake accessible at successive official poverty lines - a fact that makes their estimates spurious. This suppression of fact was expedient on the part of governments, the World Bank and their economists, for it allowed them to claim spurious poverty reduction during the period of neo-liberal reforms that they promoted and implemented. I had warned in a 2013 paper that soon the logically incorrect official method would lead to spurious claims of zero poverty, and that indeed has come to pass. What can be more illogical and absurd than to take a 50-year-old consumption basket, arrive at current 'poverty lines' that are so low that people can no longer physically survive at these levels, and then interpret the fact of no observations because there are no survivors, triumphantly as the achievement of 'zero poverty'. The elaborate structure of false statistical claims needs to be dismantled in every country. Only then can there be an honest attempt to chart a way forward to end poverty. Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation, The Long Transition and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
UN says development goals progress 'insufficient' 10 years on
Ten years after the United Nations adopted its Sustainable Development Goals, it said Monday that more people now have access to the internet, but major issues like hunger have worsened. UN member states committed in 2015 to pursuing 17 goals that range from ending extreme poverty and hunger to pursuing gender equality and clean energy by 2030. In a report published Monday, the United Nations said that 35 percent of the objectives were advancing, while around half had stagnated and the rest were heading backwards. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Chuck Norris Begs Seniors: Avoid These 3 Foods Like The Plague Roundhouse Provisions Learn More Undo This scorecard, it said, showed that the progress was "insufficient." Among the most successful was improving access to electricity, with 92 percent of the world connected by 2023. Internet usage has also risen from 40 percent to 68 percent worldwide in the last decade. Live Events Some 110 million more children and young people have entered school since 2015, the report said, while maternal mortality has fallen from 228 deaths per 100,000 births in 2015 to 197 in 2023. But some goals have receded despite this progress. In 2023, 757 million people (9.1 percent of the world's population) were suffering from hunger, compared with 713 million (7.5 percent) in 2019, the report said. Meanwhile, more than 800 million people -- around one in 10 people worldwide -- are still living in extreme poverty. "Eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 appears highly unlikely due to slow recovery from Covid-19 impacts, economic instability, climate shocks, and sluggish growth in sub-Saharan Africa," the report said. UN chief Antonio Guterres warned at a news conference that the world was facing a global development emergency. It was, he added, "an emergency measured in the over 800 million people still living in extreme poverty. In intensifying climate impacts. And in relentless debt service, draining the resources that countries need to invest in their people." However, Guterres struck a positive tone on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, saying that if they didn't exist, "many of these achievements would never have been reached."
