India, Jan. 21 -- It is an irony of numbers. Once the most populous country in the world, China today has been replaced by India and its population is declining rapidly as it is not even able to maintain the birth rate of 2.1 required to maintain its present levels. It achieved what looked impossible - to reduce the size of its population by social engineering to control population. The Chinese experiment, though successful, has lessons for nations like India which have high population rates and would like to bring them down. Should the government intervene to reverse the population growth, and if yes, to what extent?

China's birth rate is at its lowest level since 1949. In 2025, births fell to just 5.63 per 1,000 people while deaths cli...