as populous as large countries in their own right. And its overall population continues to soar. Each passing minute brings another 34 extra heads in India, the national census suggested earlier this year.

Thus it looks perfectly natural for the UN and some NGO-types to nominate a newborn baby in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, on October 31st, as a symbolic seven billionth person on the planet (though the same preposterous claim was made on behalf of a rival baby in the Philippines, another in Turkey, and perhaps others elsewhere). It was all, of course, perfectly arbitrary: the seven billionth may not be born for another six months yet, or may have been born six months ago. But it is a milestone, and a chance for demographers to ponder how seriously to take Malthusian worries about finite global resources.

For India, the seven-billion moment raises pressing issues. Take the fact that a baby girl was chosen in Uttar Pradesh. That matters in a society where girls are so systemically discriminated against that millions of them are now missing, either because they were aborted before birth or neglected and allowed to die afterwards. The sex-ratio is becoming so skewed in some parts of India, despite official efforts to prevent it, partly because of a deeply engrained culture of favouring boys and partly because of something very modern: the easy availability of a technology, ultrasound scanners, in urban, semi-urban and even some rural areas, which allows parents to find the sex of their unborn child and then abort girls. The result is a population becoming as unbalanced as China's in many places. In the short run that means lots of missing girls, which some have termed a “gendercide”. In the long run that is likely to encourage migration (or trafficking) of women, possibly crime and instability, and perhaps also slower overall population growth.

India's population growth is unbalanced in another way. The populations of southern, now richer states, such as Kerala (with high levels of literacy, schooling and good health care) or Tamil Nadu, are stabilising as middle-class families decide to have fewer children. Families in urban India, too, are smaller than rural ones. Both the cities and the south are thus drawing migrants, especially for manual labour, from elsewhere. In states with massive rural populations, notably in the north and the east, where the greatest poverty persists, the birth rate remains very high. For some Indians this is a boon. Demography, in some eyes, is one of India's big strategic assets. By 2025 India will be more populous than China. Its population will certainly be younger and so able to push growth, fill army ranks, innovate and so on for decades to come. But such benefits from demography only count as benefits if India can get other things right, most obviously turning its more poorly educated people into a skilled and capable workforce. The great anxiety in India, as elsewhere, is creating enough school places, jobs and opportunities for a massively growing population. India will keep growing for many decades yet—they may be tough times ahead.