Original article (in Albanian) was published on 10/4/2025; Author: Patris Pustina
A video circulating on social media, including Albanian-speaking platforms, alleges that the figure provided by the United Nations (UN) for the planet’s population is a fraud.
The narrator’s voice in the video says in English:
The official figures for the world population published by the United Nations, as of now have just surpassed 8 billion people living on Earth. For example, India is claimed to have a national population of over 1.4 billion citizens. But when practical calculations are made, using the UN’s own numbers, the way they arrive at such a high figure is as clear as mud. Taking their official population figures from the 300 largest cities in India, from 12.4 million in the largest city, Mumbai, to just over 100,000 in the 300th city, Aurangabad, and adding them all together, this barely adds up to 200 million out of the supposed 1.4 billion. […] It is statistically and geographically impossible for seven times that number to be mysteriously hidden in smaller cities and villages with populations under 100,000.’
The video was first posted on YouTube on October 22, 2023, by a user named Eric Dubay, a Flat Earth conspiracy theorist.
Dubay’s ‘practical calculations’ ignore key details regarding the population distribution in India.
India is a vast country. With a land area approximately three times the size of Egypt, it is the eighth largest country in the world.
However, only about a third of its population lives in urban areas. Despite this inequality, population growth is not confined to the largest metropolitan regions, and the overall population density of the country remains high, at 473 people per square kilometer. When this figure is multiplied by the country’s total area, it exceeds the 1.4 billion people estimated by the UN in the spring of 2023.
Although the idea of a village typically suggests a small number of houses grouped together, some villages in India are quite large. For instance, the village of Rarhi has over 36,000 inhabitants.
In 2019, IndiaSpend, a non-profit media organization focused on data-driven reporting, stated that at least 24,000 settlements in India are more populous than cities. According to the article, this is partly a matter of definition. For a settlement to be categorized as a city, it must have over 5,000 people, and at least 75% of its male workforce must work outside the agricultural sector. Many settlements do not meet the second criterion. Around 44% of India’s workforce still works in agriculture. Therefore, these settlements are not classified as cities, even though they may have populations as large as those of urban areas.
These settlements are not considered in the ‘practical calculations’ that Dubay claims undermine the population numbers for India, and the world, as reported by the UN.
