Each section carries the date it was last reviewed and the documents it was read against.
Age structure, without a false precision
The UN’s 2024 revision is the interim count: a projection, used until a census exists.
Secondary tabulations of World Population Prospects 2024 place India near 1.46 billion people in 2025, with a median age near 30, roughly a quarter of the population under 15, a little over two-thirds between 15 and 64, and well under a tenth aged 65 and over. World Bank Data360 rounds the 2025 population to 1.5 billion. GRIP did not re-download the UN bulk dataset, so the precise single-number total stays in the source note rather than in the headline.
The shape matters more than any single headline total. A large cohort is moving through education and into the ages when households form. A smaller share than in East Asia is already old, which postpones one fiscal pressure and leaves the pressure to create work now untouched. Fertility is near or below replacement on recent UN readings. A country can be finished with very large families and still face a crowded school-leaving year for another decade. Both descriptions fit the same numbers.
The labour-market test
People in the working ages are an opportunity if the work exists, and a political fact if it does not.
The ILO-modelled estimate carried on World Bank Data360 puts female labour-force participation at 32.4% in 2025. The series is modelled, rather than a fresh household count, and the level is low enough to decide the size of any dividend on its own. Male participation is higher. Youth unemployment and underemployment are measured by the Periodic Labour Force Survey. GRIP does not reprint a rate it has not opened in that release. For this page the direction is enough: a larger working-age population and a larger number of good jobs are different outcomes.
Education has widened. Quality and the match to the jobs actually advertised are the constraint firms report, especially outside the engineering colleges that feed the services exporters. Skill programmes exist. A certificate still has to meet a vacancy. Urbanisation continues, ahead of a census that would measure it cleanly. The cities on this site are where the formal wage is concentrated. A large share of the young cohort still lives in the districts those cities draw from, and will either move or look for work where they already are.
What a young population asks of housing and of firms
Household formation raises a housing question. It does not, by itself, produce a buyer who can pay.
People in their twenties and thirties form households, and those households need a room they can pay for near the work. In the large cities that demand meets expensive land, long commutes and a rental market that is still less institutional than the sales market. A demographic chart leaves the mortgage to be underwritten separately. It does explain why end-user demand can stay firm in a city that is adding jobs, and why the same chart says little in a city that is not.
Entrepreneurship is the other hope attached to a young population. Some of it is the venture-backed kind briefed in the ecosystem pages. More of it is a shop, a workshop, a transport operator or a clinic. Consumption follows the same ages, which is why the retail page and this page meet. The practical test is simpler than the slogan: every year a cohort arrives that the previous year’s job growth has to cover, and female employment, training and the quality of informal work decide whether that cohort becomes an asset.