There has been no dearth of official and unofficial estimates of population projections for India since the early 1950s. Some analysts have however noted that official projections have tended to reflect an optimistic picture of possible rapid demographic change while others have consistently underlined the much slower pace of the expected change. The latest document which traces three population projections over the next twenty years published by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, in contrast to the earlier estimates, appears to underscore the creeping harsh reality of the unique demographic dynamics in a gradually developing economy such as India's.