Beijing's Population Greying Rapidly: Government

Beijing: As China faces demographic crisis with rapid rise in population of old age people, the national capital is feeling the heat with numbers of pensioners climbing up to 23.4 per cent of about 22 million population.

The Beijing local government expects 30 per cent of the city's population to be aged 60 or above by 2030.

By the end of 2015, the elderly took up 23.4 per cent of the city's registered population, deputy head of the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau Li Hongbing was quoted as saying by the Beijing Daily today.

Li said one in three registered Beijing citizens will be over 60 in 2050. It is estimated that the city currently has 600,000 seniors with physical disabilities and 100,000 with mental disabilities.

In 2020, the city will pay out 200 billion yuan (USD 30.7 billion) in old-age pensions and the amount is expected to surge to 670 billion (about USD 111 billion) in 2030, Li said.

This year, the local government will roll out a 2016-2020 plan on the development of elderly care and a guideline on the development of industries targeting the elderly, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The ageing population will swell from 16.1 to 25.2 per cent in China which could seriously test its social and economic development, a new data provided by the Population and Development Studies Centre at the Renmin University of China said last month.

The number of those aged between 16 and 59 will decrease to 896 million in 2020 and 824 million in 2030, while those aged 60 and over will grow to 253 million in 2020 and 365 million in 2030 the study said.

In a bid to shore up the numbers of the younger population, China this year has ended the three decades old one-child policy and replaced it with two child as the demographic crisis deepened with sharp rise in the population of old age population.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)