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India’s population will start to shrink sooner than expected
印度人口将比预期的更早开始减少
When something happens earlier than expected, Indians say it has been “preponed”. On November 24th India’s health ministry revealed that a resolution to one of its oldest and greatest preoccupations will indeed be preponed. Some years ahead of UN predictions, and its own government targets, India’s total fertility rate—the average number of children that an Indian woman can expect to bear in her lifetime—has fallen below 2.1, which is to say below the “replacement” level at which births balance deaths.
当某事比预期发生得早时，印度人会说这是“预先安排好的”。11月24日，印度卫生部透露，一项针对印度最古老、最重要的问题之一的决议确实已经准备好了。联合国预测以及（印度）政府目标之前的几年，印度的总生育率——一个印度妇女一生中预期生育的孩子的平均数量——已经下降到2.1以下，也就是说低于出生率与死亡相平衡的“替代”水平。
In fact it dropped to just 2.0 overall, and to 1.6 in India’s cities, says the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), a country-wide health check. That is a 10% drop from the previous survey, just five years ago. This is big news not just for India but, seeing that its 1.4bn people are nearly a fifth of humanity, for the planet. The number of Indians will still grow, because many young women have yet to reach child-bearing age. But lower fertility means the population will peak sooner and at a lower figure: not in 40 years at more than 1.7bn, as was widely predicted, but probably a decade earlier, at perhaps 1.6bn.
事实上，全国家庭健康调查显示，一个印度妇女一生中预期生育的孩子的平均数量总体下降到2.0，在印度城市下降到1.6。这比仅仅5年前的上一次调查下降了10%。这不仅对印度来说是个大新闻，对整个地球来说也是个大新闻，因为印度14亿人口几乎占全球人口的五分之一。印度的人口数量仍将增长，因为许多年轻女性尚未达到生育年龄。但较低的生育率意味着人口将更早达到峰值，并将达到一个更低的数字：不是像广泛预测的那样，在40年内达到逾17亿人口，而是可能在30年内或许达到16亿人口。
India’s government has sought a lower fertility rate for decades. At independence in 1947 it was close to 6. The new republic had also just suffered a terrible wartime famine in Bengal, which left 2m-3m dead.
几十年来，印度政府一直在寻求降低生育率。在1947年独立时，它（生育率）接近6。这个新成立的共和国刚刚在孟加拉遭受了一场可怕的战争饥荒，造成了200-300万人死亡。
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