NEW DELHI: India's latest estimate of its projected population stands at nearly 1.28 billion as in 2015, even as reports in Western media has surfaced predicting that India may have already overtaken China in population figures."We go by our Census. The last Census on 2011 put India's population at 1.21 billion. For the purpose of Aadhaar enrollment, the population as an estimate in 2015 was projected at nearly 1.28 billion. There is no official figure of population of India as on date," a government official told ET, when asked on the reports in Western media, including the Guardian Newspaper.The Guardian on Wednesday reported claims of a Chinese academic, Yi Fuxian , who said Chinese statisticians had overestimated China's population by about 90 million, and claimed the country's population at end of 2016 would not have been more than 1.29 billion. "India is maybe 1.32 billion right now," the Guardian quoted Fuxian as saying.Yi’s claims, according to the New York Times, met skepticism from demographers, who said he had misread or exaggerated statistical discrepancies. But Yi said he was not just splitting statistical hairs. China’s birthrate will determine the size of the work force sustaining its economy, and the data indicated that stagnation could occur in coming decades, he said.Some Chinese experts feel Yi overstated the problems in the official data, perhaps to fit his longstanding criticism of China’s family planning controls.“To report that India surpassed China as the largest population on earth, without the announcement of some agency such as the United Nations’ Population Division, or a serious and peer-reviewed study, is not quite professional,” said Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies China’s population trends, was quoted as saying to the New York Times. “The problem with Mr. Yi’s number is that it is based on a hasty and careless calculation.”In India, too, Yi’s findings were met with raised eyebrows.KS James, a professor of population studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said it was unlikely that population estimates were so off that India had already overtaken China. That will happen in the coming years, he said.with NYT inputs