By Admin 
Indonesia’s capital Jakarta has achieved the title of the world’s most populous city. According to the new report of the United Nations, World Urbanization Prospectus, 2025, released on November 18, Jakarta has now overtaken Japan’s capital Tokyo and reached the first place with a population of about 42 million, which is equal to the total population of a country like Canada.
According to the report, Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka is at second place in this list, whose population is about 3.7 crores. At the same time, Tokyo, which was in first place for a long time, has now slipped to third place and in this list, India’s national capital Delhi is at fourth place.
How Jakarta climbed from 33rd place to first place
The UN report is also shocking because in the 2018 UN report, Jakarta was ranked 33rd and its population was stated to be only 11 million, whereas Tokyo was considered to be the most populous city in the world at that time, with a population of around 37 million.
Actually, this big change has come after a big change in the new calculation method adopted by the United Nations. Earlier, the UN urban population figures were mainly based on government records and national statistics of the respective countries, but the problem with this was that each country used to decide the city boundaries as per its convenience. Some countries considered only the municipal area as a city, while some considered the entire metropolitan area. This created disparity in global comparison.
At the same time, to overcome this shortcoming in 2025, the United Nations implemented the same criteria for classifying cities, towns and rural areas for all countries. In the new approach, it was seen that the city actually extends to the areas where people work, live and everyday life is connected to the city, they were also included in the urban population.
UN Widespread impact of new method seen in Jakarta
This new approach had the greatest impact in the case of Jakarta. Jakarta is spread on the northwest coast of the island of Java and is surrounded by several densely populated areas, which are actually part of the city, but in Indonesia’s official census these areas were not considered part of the Jakarta metropolitan area for a long time. All these areas were also included in the calculations in a new way, due to which the population of Jakarta increased rapidly to the figure of 3 crores.
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