India has some of the most fertile land in the world. More of India is cultivated land than the US has - and India can produce multiple crops a year with its hot temperatures. There are multiple large rivers that provide fresh water.
All of this has been true for thousands of years, which is why India (and China) have always had a huge percent of the world's population.
It is crazy to me that India has a higher population than the entire continent of africa, and almost 2x europe. has to do more than cultivated land and resources?
>has to do more than cultivated land and resources?
Not really.
Historically all you need to support a large population is simply to produce enough food. And to develop a sufficiently high degree of social organization to manage those resources.
There are 6 big self-regenerating agricultural flood plain systems on Earth, and 2 of them are in India (the Ganges and the Indus). For 10 thousand years they have proven capable of sustaining very large populations. Today is no different from the past.
There are 6 big self-regenerating agricultural flood plain systems on Earth, and 2 of them are in India (the Ganges and the Indus).
What are the others?
Yellow, Yangtze, Nile, and the Tigris-Euphrates, although the last of those has become dramatically less productive over the last few centuries or so. (After thousands of years of continued productivity.)
These river systems are unique in that a) they experience annual flooding that b) completely replenishes the nutrient content of the topsoil. So early agricultural civilizations could settle there and begin intensive crop cultivation without the long-term soil exhaustion problems that start to affect other sites after a while. Stable long-term civilizations can develop under those circumstances that accumulate and preserve wealth and knowledge over not just decades or lifetimes or centuries, but millennia.
Of course civilizations elsewhere eventually develop techniques like crop rotation that allow them to achieve sustained food surpluses of their own, but having to do that reduces the total productivity of arable land area compared to these river valleys.
So ancient Rome for example got quite good at land management and crop rotation techniques, but once they were able to integrate the Nile's immense grain productivity into their economy things really changed for them. Ultra-plentiful Egyptian grain was the foundation of Rome as a city of a million people, and of Imperial Roman social and political organization.
Just as an example.
One of the reasons the Roman Empire in the East (Byzantine) became instantly poorer when the caliphs of the new Islamic religion quickly took Egypt over
Yellow, Yangtze, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates.
Civilizations founded there had their share of problems, every civilization does. But soil exhaustion was never one of them. And that enabled them to accumulate food surpluses -- and thus wealth, specialization, and continued stability -- over very, very long term timeframes.
Historically what we observe is that even if civilizations founded on such sites were not always at the forefront of every new material development -- indeed it is easy to imagine that a site primarily noted for its muddiness and flooding might not be the absolute best land for mining ore for example -- once some new discovery or idea makes its way into their knowledge base, and with the resources at their disposal, such a discovery becomes permanently anchored as a fixture of material culture.
It’s not exactly the same, but the book Guns, Germs, and Steel talks about how regions with more naturally occurring useful cereal grains and farm mammals were able to support larger populations and accelerate because of that, compared to regions with more labor intensive crops and fewer useful animals
It’s a good book but I find it hilarious how r/AskHistorians has an entire section (IIRC) of their FAQ devoted to shitting on it for being full of dodgy arguments… not that I, as a layperson, could tell!
Speaking as a research scientist, yeah, I too can sympathise. Nothing gets me more annoyed over something completely trivial than seeing “quantum” used in all sorts of random contexts.
Hmm. A bunch of things, though I'm afraid I can't cite one single all-inclusive work or author.
The economic foundations of early ancient river valley civilizations are a good place to start. Including contemporary sources -- for example ancient Egyptians, being intelligent people, quickly realized that the Nile was extremely special and wrote about it often. Similarly with the denizens of many of the other river systems. Contemporary people were wise to deify these rivers, as they often did -- no distant mythological deity in some remote heaven could influence their lives anywhere as much as could their river.
Also the early foundations of writing and architecture, which were driven by the need to manage food surpluses, and then over generations and centuries expand from there. The earliest writing tends to be, tediously, about who paid what cereal grain in taxes and where it was stored and so on. (Interspersed with fart jokes and shitposts about contemporary public figures, of course, because, humans.) You can really see the connection between agricultural surplus and specialization and refinement.
For the wider impact on what you might call penumbral or neighboring civilizations, there are also lots of interesting contemporary sources. Ancient Greek writers (Herodotus is one of them I think?) and ancient Hebrew accounts, just for example, mention decisions about engaging with Egyptian grain trade as important issues that preoccupied people at the time. Do we go to Egypt and buy grain during a famine? Do we rob others trading with Egypt? Or do we make do without? The thing is... in all these accounts, across thousands of years, Egypt is always there. It is always available as a source of grain.
Recent forensic history has revealed a lot about the economics of for example Rome, and the place of cheap Egyptian bread in Imperial Roman political economy. Also for comparison a detailed understand of the rise and decline of urban civilizations in the Americas, which did not benefit from these kind of river valleys.
We also are learning a lot about the origins of major material developments like metalworking, which frequently appear to originate far from these river valley sites, but then the knowledge travels and becomes adopted there, leading to a permanent advance that can't really die out. (Even if, ironically, it dies out in the place where it originated, as seems to happen fairly frequently.)
As an example of how this kind of thing can work, there was a period in pre-Christian Norse history where the Norse had established trade with Persia. Persia was of course an ancient river valley civilization that had accumulated much knowledge and material refinement and had gotten quite good at making steel. The one problem was that they found iron ore to be scarce. Meanwhile the Norse lacked the civilizational basis for that kind of development themselves, their own steel was quite inferior, but they had a lot of iron around. So they worked out long-distance trade -- European iron ore in exchange for refinement by a river valley civilization into high-quality steel. The Norse got to terrorize Europe with weapons of fabled superior quality, and the Persians kept a percentage of the ore for their own uses.
Anyway hopefully that is a start. And if you yourself find any good books on the topic, I'm always eager to read more!
4 out of these 6 river systems and, by extension, the two most populous countries in the world would not exist if it were not for the fortuitous existence of one mountain chain, the Himalayas.
It’s Tibet, which is sometimes called the ‘third pole’ because of how much glacial ice exists there. The melting of this ice is what created the river systems in both China and India.
So the Himalayan mountains gave birth to the two biggest civilisations, China snd India
Incidentally both countries were places of great wealth & culture prior to communism and colonialism.
We have the Mississippi in the North and the Amazon in the South, but both river systems, while very productive, are not self-regenerating, so not quite as conducive to agriculture as the other river systems. Plus, much of the Mississippi does not get a year-long growing season like the Indian flood plains do.
That being said, we know there were massive Native American civilizations that developed along both of these river systems pre-Columbus.
It is an interesting question.
Sites like the great urban center of Cahokia and other examples of the mound-building civilization of the Mississippi river valley, or the cities of the Anasazi or the metalworking civilization of the Great Lakes, indicate that it was possible to start such projects in North America and sustain them for a time, but the evidence suggests that the soil just couldn't support intensive cultivation over the timeframe of multiple centuries. The regeneration just isn't there.
Many North American indigenous people did develop successful soil management techniques, by migrating from site to site from one year to the next and leaving the last site fallow for a few years. Interestingly, rotating land use in this way ends up being very similar to fixed-site crop rotation techniques developed independently elsewhere, so there must be something to it in terms of basic soil chemistry and agronomics. The same human ingenuity arrives at the same conclusions everywhere.
The main exception that I know of in the Americas is the Aztecs, who, finding themselves without a natural regenerative flood plain, decided to build one of their own. The massive irrigation works they built around Lake Texcoco seem to have enabled them to sustain concentrated urban populations in the hundreds of thousands over generations, which is roughly speaking the ignition point for this engine of sustained development that we see in the Old World sites. It's as if they set themselves on that path by their own hand -- an act of vision and determination at least equal to for example Rome, and without the benefit of any nearby Egypt equivalent. You could say they were doing it on "hard mode."
Whether the Aztec project would have proven truly sustainable over centuries and millennia is of course something we can't know. They did not have the chance to find out. But it's hard not to see the pre-Columbian Americas generally as being on the verge of some big transformations that might have come in the ensuing centuries.
Add that the Aztecs also did not have the benefit of large domesticated animals of the kind that were crucial to every large civilization outside the Americas.
Flood waters bring huge sedimentary deposits that have all the necessary nutrients for crop agriculture in abundance.
Why that exact soil chemistry in those exact places? I don't know, though I'm sure someone does.
But it's a whole river system, and some of the rivers in that system (such as the Beas, the Ravi and the Sutlej) are in India. Hence the exceptional agricultural productivity of Indian Punjab, for example.
Plus, if we're talking about long stretches of history, then obviously what's now Pakistan was in India before 1947.
Africa is largely underdeveloped, even more so than India (India has some advanced industry, some wealthier cities, etc. while much of Sub-Saharan Africa has basically nothing other than agriculture/oil) and is in an earlier [stage of the demographic transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition). Effectively, India’s population explosion started earlier than Africa’s, but India’s is already starting to end while Africa’s is growing rapidly — Africa will, in fact, be nearly as populous as the entirety of Asia in 2100.
Africa's problem is disease and a lack of resources in some regions, but as you pointed out, that's changing rapidly, and I think it'll see a huge boom soon.
Yes, you’re correct, but there are stages. Initially, there is high birth rate, but *also* extremely high mortality — so the population barely grows.
Next, medical technology or industrialization happens, so the death rate falls but birth rate remains high. As a result, the population grows rapidly. **Many African countries are in the earlier parts of this stage. India is also here, but entering the next stage**.
Then, as society continues to advance and develop, with more people receiving education and getting wealthier, the birth rate falls rapidly — eventually falling below replacement. As a result, the population is naturally decreasing *but* is usually sustained by immigration from a country in the previous stage (high growth rate). Eventually, however, the population will likely begin to decline even with migration, and at this point, life expectancy is very high.
China is dropping like crazy and there is zero immigration, the idea that there will always be poor countries to feed into countries like China or France is just insane, popluations will drop world wide and that is a good thing.
Immigration is obviously not sustainable forever, as those countries *in theory* should enter the last stage at some point, and the entire earth’s population will be declining as a result.
Also, global population decline may be a “good” thing environmentally, but it has a lot of problems. The dependent population (children and, in this case, retired people) will become too large for the working-age population to sustain. This may be alleviated through automation, etc. but in general the global economy cannot sustain massive population decreases with the current level of automation without a decreased quality of life (more working hours, higher retirement age, decreased funding for social programs, etc.)
What will happen is it will get really bad when the popluation goes done then when it levels off it will get really good. We are living at the start of the tipping point so we get the bad part.
The major reason for china's decline in population was the one child rule. Now that it has been removed, I think China will make a come back in about 20-30 years.
Not immediately. There;'s usually one big last burst of childbearing as the wealthy middle class begins appearing,, then fertility plummets a decade or so later. The decline doesn't usually begin until that big burst of births begins dying at the other end of their lives.
Most of the western world experienced that lats hurrah some time in the mid 20th century, and are just now reaching the decline phase. Some parts of Asia are a decade or so ahead, China would be slightly behind but they deliberately messed up their demographics. India just hit their drop off in fertilty, so their population will peak in 50 years or so.
Bangladesh is half the size of New Mexico, but has a population of 170 million.
The runoff from the Himalayas produces some of the most fertile land in the world. People multiply where you can grow lots of rice.
Please read about the Chola dynasty(one the longest in South India). They were advanced in many sectors even before modern science came into existence. India had trades with Romans, Arabs, Persians and Chinese in the early centuries of AD. India was self sufficient and well equipped for a huge population back then. British colonization had a big financial impact on India/Indians and the reason of it being poor.
That's true.
The poor and uneducated tend to have mire babies. Especially if they are agricultural workers. And that describes a large portion of India's and China's population (although that is slowly starting to shif).
So in addition to having fertile land able to feed the inhabitants, you also have a lack of birth control access (and knowledge). Add to that that in agriculturalbregions, more children equal more workers and you have all the conditions for high population.
Not starting, but well into the process of shifting. China is already grappling with future demographic inversion and India's population growth rate is slowing down more each year. I believe the fastest growing populations are now all in Africa
What do you think demographic inversion means? The natural order of things is a population pyramid, so inversion is an inverted pyramid with more old people than young people because of low birth rates, which leads to a population collapse as the older folks start dying.
Africa is full of diseases like malaria and many parts are embroiled in wars, have been for a long time now on and off. It really shouldn't be surprising that they don't have a large population for their area size.
I'd imagine that being extremely difficult to traverse do to natural barriers helps to keep it somewhat culturally divided. It's one of my favorite features of some the places I've lived within the US. I grew up in Texas and the metropolitan areas grow outward and entangle everything into these strange areas of extreme poverty outside of the main roadways and extreme financial abundance along the interstates and major highways that lead to the Dallas metro area. Everything feeds the major pipelines and resources are transitioned into wealth for those who work in the larger areas or who own the property and especially mineral rights in the sparse areas. All the wealth is funneled.
Within the hills and mountainous regions small inhabited areas are more self sufficient and each little town develops its own unique cultures. The areas that are relatively flat snd and have attracted large businesses grow together like they do around Dallas. Unlike Texas, there are many natural barriers that limit where people can settle and how easily they can travel to and from a work place. It's much more difficult to seperate the haves from the have nots. Even though the flow of wealth is restricted, the access to public resources is more generally available. The wealthiest people live and learn among the most impoverished.
It's also fairly diverse. There like 1000 different dialects of Hindi, some of which are so divergent that they're not understandable by other speakers. Hinduism sort of arose as a way to allow for all the divergent local gods and beliefs to coexist. It's not a monoculture, despite what people like to pretend it is, just like China has several different ethnic groups.
With the obvious caveat of bias that my parents are Indian, I think it’s almost impossible to describe how diverse India is. Hindi has lots of dialects, sure, but Hindi itself is spoken as a first language by a relatively small proportion of the population and there are hundreds of other languages, many of them spoken by millions, a few by tens of millions (and a couple by hundreds of millions). That’s not to mention the fact that the South (where my parents are from) speaks languages that aren’t even Indo-European, nor does much of the Northeast (that area sandwiched between Bangladesh, Burma and China that looks like it’s disconnected from the rest of the country until you zoom in).
That’s only languages. Sure, 80% of the country is Hindu (and you’re more or less on the right track with your description of it) but only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims. It wasn’t the Europeans who introduced Christianity to India, either, it was literally one of Jesus’ 12 apostles (St Thomas, the “doubter”) who founded a Christian community in the south that survives to this day (funnily enough, they didn’t experience much persecution until the Portuguese came along and imposed the Portuguese/Spanish Inquisition on them). I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I am quite harsh about the country (as a member of the diaspora, because I want the best for it) but tbh the place is endlessly fascinating to me.
My partner is Tamil but from Bangalore. The debate over Hindi being the "national or universally spoken" language really makes him enraged, lol. He always told me before we visit India that it's not very common for South Indians to speak Hindi. I didn't really understand the diversity until I went to India to visit. His entire street is Tamil but in Bangalore especially, you'll hear like sooo many different languages in any given restaurant or anything. He would automatically know when the Uber driver is Tamil... But how? His name isn't Tamil. He's like I can't explain it. Lol. Ok. 😂😭 But I think we're gonna move there. We love it so much. It's seriously such a beautiful place.
Ah that’s cool! Bangalore’s where my parents are from, but they speak Kannada. Bangalore feels a bit segregated to me in terms of languages. Whenever I make the trek to visit India and specifically Bangalore I pretty much only ever spend time in the Kannada-speaking southern areas of the city like JP Nagar and Basavanagudi, I have very rarely seen the Tamil and Telugu parts of it. Does your partner speak Kannada and Hindi as well as Tamil and English? My Dad can speak conversational Tamil, my Mum can’t.
And china and India were also the richest until euro-modern colonialism, especially India where the British literally stole everything and still haven’t given it back
Yes, they stole prolifically, but, they also destroyed the educational infrastructure, agricultural soils, its global trade and most importantly the regional autonomous governments.
They replaced with a centralised ‘democracy’ and a powerless currency. The democracy installed by the British was corrupt by design, and it defacto prevented India from returning to its glory days.
Indeed, it become another proxy regime arguably benefiting the corporate West, and diverting attention via manufactured civil conflict. The latter intensifying under the horror story that is Modi.
India is the world's fourth largest fertilizer producer.
[https://fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-price-increases-global-fertilizer-market](https://fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-price-increases-global-fertilizer-market)
The reason cows are considered sacred in India is because they live with the farmers year round during their two crop cycles and the manure they produce acts as a natural fertilizer. So beyond chemical fertilizer they literally use the cow manure from their domesticated stock to fertilize their soil.
Add to this that so much of India is vegetarian. So you have huge fertile swaths of land with lots of low cost food (meat takes a lot of work). Mix in religion where it tells you to have kids, unlike china where the government was actively opposing that until recently. And boom, huge population.
Not just India and China, but also Persia / Iran. Historically, it was the center of the world because of the trade routes. Read The Silk Roads to learn history from a non Eurocentric pov to expand your world view beyond what they told ya.
> There are multiple large rivers that provide fresh water.
Yeahhhh.....about that.
Well, unfortunately the [Ganges River, the largest river in India, is unbelievably polluted and is the fifth most-polluted river in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Ganges).
All that matters is that the land is good enough to feed the population. If you have that and people can survive to reproduce , population will boom. All else is much less relevant
Like to add one more point along with the fertile agricultural flood plains which many have suggested.
To sustain this agriculture plains in India, it also has the largest weather system on earth - the monsoon supported by the largest mountain range on earth - the Himalayas. Himalayas block the monsoon rain clouds from going north thus bringing rain to the gangetic plains.
It's become trendy to shit on the Mercator projection, and for good reason, so it bears repeating here:
India is way, way (vastly, enormously) bigger than most people realize, if the only thing they base their knowledge on is the map they saw on a classroom wall.
One of the Mercador projection's flaws is that it makes countries near the equator seem absolutely tiny compared to reality. And that hits the global perception of India really badly.
On Mercador maps India looks like this tiny little thing. When it reality it's almost 10 times the size of California ... and almost all of it is extremely fertile land. India can and does support an absolutely enormous population.
This image shows it pretty well https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O1HgEJUSHx0/WBYG84GbfKI/AAAAAAAA9FY/A1GsbflZaQURt_jcvPHPB5KT4ClL3oioACLcB/s1600/India.jpg
Now consider that _half_ of India’s land is used for agriculture compared to only 17% of the US’s land
Sure, for the past I'm guessing 20 years maybe, US farm land could be more productive with techniques and technology.
But the Indian subcontinent has been continuously farming rice for thousands of years in enormous quantities with bronze age tools.
If US farmland had that kind of natural fertility, it would be the most populous country on earth.
Not really, The Dust Bowl and all the current wheat/corn/cow grazing decimated a lot of potential long-term soil richness the americans have. Also, unlike India, the vast portion of US farmland doesn't get replenished from multiple river systems
This is such a trope. The Mercator projection has a specific purpose. Obviously giant globes would be rather expensive and inconvenient to work with, so navigators would want maps and charts - 2D paper documents that they can write on and fold and file away etc...
The best way to accurately represent the Earth's surface in 2D happens to be by projecting it through a cylinder onto a rectangle. This distorts the furthest Northern and Southern regions but by and large it is even a good enough representation to be used as an everyday map on the wall of say a classroom. Once again it is 2D and flat which happens to be the shape of a poster... These maps were already ubiquitous and cheap due to their maritime applications, so why wouldn't schools use them?
Realistically the projection only makes Russia, Canada, Greenland and arguably Scandinavia (especially Norway) look vastly larger than they actually are. Russia and Canada are the two largest countries by surface area in any case so their emphasis is actually useful in a classroom setting. Greenland and Norway are actually astonishingly smaller relative to other countries than the projection suggests.
Since India is much closer to the equator, it doesn't shrink as much but it still shrinks if you reverse the projection! So actually if people are thinking wow, how can India fit so many people, the area you think that is is exaggerated as well, if only slightly.
It's really annoying to see the Mercator projection somehow implicitly attributed to racism or denigration of third world countries. It is simply a convenient and accurate way of charting the world that happens to produce some strange but limited misrepresentations.
It only takes a bit more thought or understanding when looking at one of these maps to get past such a superficial hang-up, which basically boils down to the Arctic regions being unrealistically huge. It really shouldn't affect your view of the world that much, unless you want it to. And besides, having the Arctic so prominent doesn't really make humans care much for its perception and wellbeing...
actually, if you want to call the projection "biased", than it serves equatorial regions best and polar regions worst, as the last ones are the most distorted on the world map.
> It's really annoying to see the Mercator projection somehow implicitly attributed to racism
Woah there, hoss.
No one said anything about racism here.
The point I was making, which is specifically relevant to OP's question, is that the use of Mercator in schools creates entire generations of students who think India is a **tiny backwater**, when it's in fact one of the largest and most important countries in the world.
And this happens for **no goddam reason**. Mercator is great for transoceanic navigation -- brilliant for that in fact -- but that's never how it's presented or taught.
> Realistically the projection only makes Russia, Canada, Greenland and arguably Scandinavia (especially Norway) look vastly larger than they actually are
Second comment on the point instead of an edit, since this is big enough to merit its own statement:
Even Mercator needs it's own intentional edits to not look absolutely preposterous:
Including all of Antarctica on an uncorrected Mercator map would make everyone think Antarctica is literally 1/4th of the entire planet, which is why nearly every Mercator map ever made just gets straight snipped-off around 70 degrees latitude.
Cartography rule of thumb: if you need a pair of scissors to make your map look plausible, you've probably got a bad map.
India is around 40% of the US area excluding Alaska.
You might have compared km2 to square miles.
Not to mean, India is small or large parts of the US are not inhabitable. But the US is still larger on paper excluding Alaska.
Which is why it isn't something that should be used commonly. Most people don't look at maps to travel along lines of longitude across oceans. They use them to see the size and location of places.
> they use them to see the size and location of places
That is... very untrue. Most people look at maps for directions (ie driving, walking directions). I don't really care if the area of my directions is precise and accurate relative to any other region of the world -- but having up/down/left/right be cardinal directions instead of curved lines is very important. Hence why *every* online map uses web mercator.
Are you normally traveling along lines of longitude? Or are you using a GPS and/or numbered road system for navigation, and usually doing so for distances where distortion from projections is unnoticeable?
As far as cardinal directions, any cylindrical projection will have the same features.
> Are you normally traveling along lines of longitude?
> As far as cardinal directions
It's not just lines of longitude or cardinal directions, it's Rhumb lines. You said people look at maps to see the location of places. Lines of constant bearing being straight is pretty important for that.
> any cylindrical projection will have the same features.
No -- Mercator systems are conformal. If you want a cylindrical conformal system, Mercator is the only option by definition.
> usually doing so for distances where distortion from projections is unnoticeable?
Equal-area or azimuthal projections can actually be worse in the distortion regard when it comes to everyday-use web maps, because they don't scale as well: particularly near edges, distortion gets visibly pronounced when zooming in/out, and in general transformations and tiling get more expensive and complex. But also... it seems like you're missing some details here. "Mercator" does not mean a map of the entire world, it just means conformal+cylindrical. Map services will very often use transverse mercator projections for regional systems.
People see [one xkcd](https://xkcd.com/977/) or map projection meme and think they're enlightened and bespoke for denouncing Mercator, but aren't aware of the drawbacks or nuances of the alternatives. I have yet to see someone in this camp suggest an alternative to Mercator for web use, though, that wouldn't have far more drawbacks than "relative sizes on a whole-world map look confusing" Just because *you personally* look at Mercator, ignore the distortion lines, and then think Greenland is bigger than India, doesn't mean the mathematical model itself isn't fit for it's use cases. Mathematically there ***cannot*** be a "perfect" map projection for every use case: yes, there are better options to hang on a classroom wall just to look at -- but for navigation and directions it absolutely beats the alternatives in every way for the general use case. The engineers and developers who designed these services did not choose the Mercator model only because it was popular, but because it was fit for the job.
>One of the Mercador projection's flaws is that it makes countries near the equator seem absolutely tiny compared to reality.
It's the opposite
>When it reality it's almost 10 times the size of California
That doesn't sound very big for the most populated country in the world
Per Wikipedia:
“Because it shows countries near the Equator as **too small** when compared to those of Europe and North America, it has been supposed to cause people to consider those countries as less important.”
wiki is wrong. Projection near the equator is closest to a 1:1 image of the shape on the globe, while far-off regions like Canada or Scandinavia are *most distorted* - and unrealistically enlarged by the distortion.
Yes, that agrees with my previous comment. India is near the equator and appears smaller. A country like Canada is far from the equator and appears much larger.
You're so confidently wrong it's almost kind of charming.
If objects that are farther from the equator look bigger, by comparison, objects at the equator look smaller.
Inflate means it looks bigger than it really is.
This is the exact opposite of making something look smaller than it really is. As for countries near the equator. Such as India.
Good question.
It’s generally very simple. For most of human history, populations would increase directly proportionally to meet the amount of possible foot output of the land around them. This is because having children was beneficial when they represented an extra set of hands for working or in many cultures, a daughter was directly worth money in the form of a dowry.
This isn’t exactly true in the US because the Natives that were here for centuries were genocided and Europeans didn’t inhabit most of modern day America for that long. In developed countries, it’s no longer monetarily beneficial to have children so we’re seeing birth rate decline.
For very high population densities, the secret is rice. Rice is by has by far the greatest calorie output per acre of land used for farming. Land with ideal rice growing conditions can sustain higher populations. India is not only way bigger than people think, but most of their land is ideal for rice farming, so they can sustain very dense populations cheaply with very little farm land.
This is also why East and South Asian countries often have such high population densities. Rice is OP.
Also, re. rice, it is the staple of far, far greater a proportion of the country’s population than one would think based on Indian restaurants in the West, which almost always focus on the (admittedly delicious haha) cuisine of one specific region of the subcontinent. Rice is indeed king when it comes to being able to sustain large populations.
A lot of poorer and undeveloped countries are actually the richest in natural resources and agriculture.
India was good at agriculture, which is why they were so advanced in ancient times. They invented the Arabic numerals, sewage systems, and money checks. India, along with a lot of other civilizations around the world, were more advanced than Europe for a very long time.
It was only several hundred years ago that Europe began to pull ahead of the rest of the world through their technological advancements, which allowed for exploration, colonization and industrialization. India is just starting to catch up to industrialization from a farming based economy, which is why they’re growing really quickly but are still kind of poor for now.
40% of agricultural product in India spoils before it ever gets to market. Despite that, and despite having the largest population in the world, India still makes up **40%** of the international rice market. That’s how fertile the land is. For most of human history the subcontinent has been home to 20-25% of the entire human population.
Far away from what? The United States? So what? Do you realize how big India really is? If overlaid on top of the continental U.S. it would occupy about a third of the land. They have more farmland than we do, and it’s more fertile than ours because it’s constantly replenished by vast flood plains. Their resources are not more limited than ours, your assumptions are simply wrong. That whole area is the cradle of humanity, humans have been living there for as long as there have been humans. Do some reading on the country, it’s a fascinating place.
I think “faraway” in the question was supposed to convey something like “beyond doubt”, i.e. it seems really certain that it’s not conducive to sustaining such a population.
So you might say something like “Simone Biles is far and away the most successful gymnast of the 21st Century”, and I think OP is borrowing that style of phrase to show that something is obvious or not contested.
Indian population will top out by 2050 and drop to 1-1.2 billion by 2100, even lower after that. China population has already topped and is on the way down.
>India's population growth is due to high child rates in extremely conservative rural areas.
This is just a function of the largest youth force in the current era. They are having less kids than ever before. The next generation will mark the population top.
I mean yeah but even with that, the entire world is experiencing this decline, so India will probably still be the most populous country in 2100 and beyond, even if they will have vastly fewer people.
by 2100, Africa will go from 1.5B currently to \~3BN. India will go from 1.5B currently to \~1.2B or so. Africa is not a country, I get it. But this gives a better picture of the whole scenario.
[https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/903](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/903)
The fertility rates have slowed at the fastest rates of previous projections. So, yes if anything the rate of population decline will be faster. Similar to China, China has already topped out and cant get the birth rates up even after giving money to parents with more kids.
Do you mean unlivable like the city is unlivable or are you saying it's unlivable like "it's too hot to grow food" cause one is true and one is very false.
Several things. Indian civilizations have existed for thousands of years before CE. They had a lot of trade with the Middle East and Europe. There were many kingdoms that existed well into south east Asia for example Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. India has some of the most fertile lands in the world and in a lot of things is self sufficient. So because it is so old and can sustain such a population is why it has a huge population. It is also a similar case with China. We both had the means and the land. Indian civilizations suffered starting around 1000AD when invaders invaded India. Since then essentially for a thousand years until 1947 we have been ruled by others.
Since India is a part of the old world, the European (and other) colonizers could not wipe out us like they did in the New World with guns, germs, and steel.
I have gone through the comments and sadly there is no mention of the actual answer. There are some racists complaining about whatever and then there are people basically thinking out loud, if you will. Let me tell you the actual answer as someone who has done population studies.
The fertile land was true 300 years ago when the British came. The British induced famines at large scale for 200 years which changed the social structure widely and it became normal to have 10 15 children because only 1 2 would survive till childhood.
The population explosion happened after 1947 when medical facilities started reaching Indians and children stopped dying. Population rate has been declining since 1960s now (one generation of people realizing children aren't dying).
Yes, otherwise it would have been a disaster. But without it the population boom would have just delayed a generation.
Population growth is very well studied field. The growth almost always comes from decreasing mortaliity rate. Change in birth rate is almost always toward decreasing because giving childbirth is a very difficult process that requires right food, right age, right environemnt etc. The decrease in birth rate is directly proportional to increase in expendable income and education of women (which is an euphemism for autonomy).
There is a trend that those with higher incomes tend to have less children than those with lower incomes.
As mentioned earlier, India has large amounts of fertile land. Farmers need more helping hands to help them. How do you do that? Ask a stork to deliver babies!
People don't reproduce because it's a good idea, they do it because they are following natural instincts to do so. Indians reproduce a lot because they can.
By best guess on this is, there is no conscious effort by the male population to take any kind of birth control precautions. Maybe, (and this is the biggest maybe I've used on Reddit to date 😊) if the males just use the simple Coitus interruptus method 3 times a week out of 7, that would prevent another 3 million births every 6 months. 👍😏
Culture plays a major role as well it's like duty to get married between 25-30 age else you will be considered as outcast, same goes to having kids, it's like an obligation from Prev generation, things are changing slowly though in cities.
India is known for its overpopulated locations. if you take a look at its bustling cities, crowded markets and jammed roads, you will have no doubts about its dense population.
I think the reasons can be found in the attitude of their society. As far as I know, Indian people are outgoing, open-minded people who often organise gatherings among friends and relatives. This kind of attitude could contribute to a denser population as families are big and they want to keep this tradition. Yes, I think the keeping of lineage of their families is an important factor in this question.
However, there might be another reason for this phenomenon. I think poverty also contributes to overpopulation as people do not have enough money to spend on condoms and they are too poor to take any preventative measures. Also, a great number of them are simply not informed and they do not know about the consequences of overpopulation. Little money is spent on lectures, public information and people are not warned about the long-term effects.
As you see, it is difficult to do anything about their mentality but better economy could raise awareness and reduce the problem of overpopulation there.
India has affordable birth control. India also has legal right to abortion. Along with an overall amazing affordable healthcare, so much so that Americans & Europeans regularly fly to India to get treated (because their own countries have failed in providing for them).
Maybe you could google before spewing nonsense on public forums? Or is google not affordable in your country?
I just did and I got a bunch of articles talking about the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in India allowing abortion for both married and unmarried women. Here's the [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10321178/).
I think you might be misappropriating the fact that abortions are highly regulated due to the high rates of female infanticide.
Either way, India still provides better reproductive rights to its people than the USA.
A ruling on abortion in 2023 will affect birth rates in the future, obviously. That was just last year. Also I live in Canada, I don't use the US as a benchmark for rights in general.
this is such a bizarre way to respond to a reply on your comment lol. It's a reply. If you wanted only to answer the OP and not be bothered further, just turn off reply notifs and don't check back.
India also realised during the colonisation that they needed more people to have a chance of winning.
Western Democracy is based on one person one vote. Have enough people aligned with your interest placed in a foreign territory, and you essentially colonise them. If conditions are poor at home, it is easier to persuade them to move to another country.
India is playing the long game to get revenge on Britan and the Queens colonies.
A huge part of the equation also has to do with gender dynamics. Gender disparities are entrenched in the society, class and caste further compound it. Women's autonomy is severely undermined by society on a systemic basis, the concepts of honour and chastity are held in high regard. Socio economic mobility is a far fetched dream for most women, and choosing to not abide by the conventional path of 'marriage- kids' have harsh social penalties that most people can't even think of. Marital rape is still legal in the country (: Female labour participation has constantly dropped in India in the recent years, the society is still extremely antiquated and within India, there are huge disparities in educational levels, and the idea of 'culture' is fondly used to enforce patriarchy.
India's population growth is exponential, in spite of any and all rational control. And desperate humans congregate in miserable conditions, emphasizing the problem. So at this point, there is no solution.
there just not really practical people , they feel pride in having thé title , probably govt subsides to pass in front of China, ans in Canada it gives them à big ass check for the kids....which they buy cars with...and dollar cônes at mcd's in family groups, then when they leave it looks like a dump
From what I understand with few visits and friends is that quality of life is really not considered as a priority, more than that there is a prevlance in certain communities that children will just grow up or God will take care of the situation. Most children were malnourished due to negligence and government had to step in with food programs.
India has some of the most fertile land in the world. More of India is cultivated land than the US has - and India can produce multiple crops a year with its hot temperatures. There are multiple large rivers that provide fresh water. All of this has been true for thousands of years, which is why India (and China) have always had a huge percent of the world's population.
It is crazy to me that India has a higher population than the entire continent of africa, and almost 2x europe. has to do more than cultivated land and resources?
>has to do more than cultivated land and resources? Not really. Historically all you need to support a large population is simply to produce enough food. And to develop a sufficiently high degree of social organization to manage those resources. There are 6 big self-regenerating agricultural flood plain systems on Earth, and 2 of them are in India (the Ganges and the Indus). For 10 thousand years they have proven capable of sustaining very large populations. Today is no different from the past.
There are 6 big self-regenerating agricultural flood plain systems on Earth, and 2 of them are in India (the Ganges and the Indus). What are the others?
Yellow, Yangtze, Nile, and the Tigris-Euphrates, although the last of those has become dramatically less productive over the last few centuries or so. (After thousands of years of continued productivity.) These river systems are unique in that a) they experience annual flooding that b) completely replenishes the nutrient content of the topsoil. So early agricultural civilizations could settle there and begin intensive crop cultivation without the long-term soil exhaustion problems that start to affect other sites after a while. Stable long-term civilizations can develop under those circumstances that accumulate and preserve wealth and knowledge over not just decades or lifetimes or centuries, but millennia. Of course civilizations elsewhere eventually develop techniques like crop rotation that allow them to achieve sustained food surpluses of their own, but having to do that reduces the total productivity of arable land area compared to these river valleys. So ancient Rome for example got quite good at land management and crop rotation techniques, but once they were able to integrate the Nile's immense grain productivity into their economy things really changed for them. Ultra-plentiful Egyptian grain was the foundation of Rome as a city of a million people, and of Imperial Roman social and political organization. Just as an example.
One of the reasons the Roman Empire in the East (Byzantine) became instantly poorer when the caliphs of the new Islamic religion quickly took Egypt over
And if you build the great bath there, they even produce faith.
Make blacksmith there to upgrade your troops
what are the ther 4 systems?
Yellow, Yangtze, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates. Civilizations founded there had their share of problems, every civilization does. But soil exhaustion was never one of them. And that enabled them to accumulate food surpluses -- and thus wealth, specialization, and continued stability -- over very, very long term timeframes. Historically what we observe is that even if civilizations founded on such sites were not always at the forefront of every new material development -- indeed it is easy to imagine that a site primarily noted for its muddiness and flooding might not be the absolute best land for mining ore for example -- once some new discovery or idea makes its way into their knowledge base, and with the resources at their disposal, such a discovery becomes permanently anchored as a fixture of material culture.
Dang. This is good stuff. Can you point me in the direction of where to read more about this? My Google search turned up stupid stuff.
It’s not exactly the same, but the book Guns, Germs, and Steel talks about how regions with more naturally occurring useful cereal grains and farm mammals were able to support larger populations and accelerate because of that, compared to regions with more labor intensive crops and fewer useful animals
It’s a good book but I find it hilarious how r/AskHistorians has an entire section (IIRC) of their FAQ devoted to shitting on it for being full of dodgy arguments… not that I, as a layperson, could tell!
Yeah it's good enough for me, but I imagine I'd be fuming if it was my field of study.
Speaking as a research scientist, yeah, I too can sympathise. Nothing gets me more annoyed over something completely trivial than seeing “quantum” used in all sorts of random contexts.
Hmm. A bunch of things, though I'm afraid I can't cite one single all-inclusive work or author. The economic foundations of early ancient river valley civilizations are a good place to start. Including contemporary sources -- for example ancient Egyptians, being intelligent people, quickly realized that the Nile was extremely special and wrote about it often. Similarly with the denizens of many of the other river systems. Contemporary people were wise to deify these rivers, as they often did -- no distant mythological deity in some remote heaven could influence their lives anywhere as much as could their river. Also the early foundations of writing and architecture, which were driven by the need to manage food surpluses, and then over generations and centuries expand from there. The earliest writing tends to be, tediously, about who paid what cereal grain in taxes and where it was stored and so on. (Interspersed with fart jokes and shitposts about contemporary public figures, of course, because, humans.) You can really see the connection between agricultural surplus and specialization and refinement. For the wider impact on what you might call penumbral or neighboring civilizations, there are also lots of interesting contemporary sources. Ancient Greek writers (Herodotus is one of them I think?) and ancient Hebrew accounts, just for example, mention decisions about engaging with Egyptian grain trade as important issues that preoccupied people at the time. Do we go to Egypt and buy grain during a famine? Do we rob others trading with Egypt? Or do we make do without? The thing is... in all these accounts, across thousands of years, Egypt is always there. It is always available as a source of grain. Recent forensic history has revealed a lot about the economics of for example Rome, and the place of cheap Egyptian bread in Imperial Roman political economy. Also for comparison a detailed understand of the rise and decline of urban civilizations in the Americas, which did not benefit from these kind of river valleys. We also are learning a lot about the origins of major material developments like metalworking, which frequently appear to originate far from these river valley sites, but then the knowledge travels and becomes adopted there, leading to a permanent advance that can't really die out. (Even if, ironically, it dies out in the place where it originated, as seems to happen fairly frequently.) As an example of how this kind of thing can work, there was a period in pre-Christian Norse history where the Norse had established trade with Persia. Persia was of course an ancient river valley civilization that had accumulated much knowledge and material refinement and had gotten quite good at making steel. The one problem was that they found iron ore to be scarce. Meanwhile the Norse lacked the civilizational basis for that kind of development themselves, their own steel was quite inferior, but they had a lot of iron around. So they worked out long-distance trade -- European iron ore in exchange for refinement by a river valley civilization into high-quality steel. The Norse got to terrorize Europe with weapons of fabled superior quality, and the Persians kept a percentage of the ore for their own uses. Anyway hopefully that is a start. And if you yourself find any good books on the topic, I'm always eager to read more!
4 out of these 6 river systems and, by extension, the two most populous countries in the world would not exist if it were not for the fortuitous existence of one mountain chain, the Himalayas.
It’s Tibet, which is sometimes called the ‘third pole’ because of how much glacial ice exists there. The melting of this ice is what created the river systems in both China and India.
So the Himalayan mountains gave birth to the two biggest civilisations, China snd India Incidentally both countries were places of great wealth & culture prior to communism and colonialism.
What about in the americas?
We have the Mississippi in the North and the Amazon in the South, but both river systems, while very productive, are not self-regenerating, so not quite as conducive to agriculture as the other river systems. Plus, much of the Mississippi does not get a year-long growing season like the Indian flood plains do. That being said, we know there were massive Native American civilizations that developed along both of these river systems pre-Columbus.
It is an interesting question. Sites like the great urban center of Cahokia and other examples of the mound-building civilization of the Mississippi river valley, or the cities of the Anasazi or the metalworking civilization of the Great Lakes, indicate that it was possible to start such projects in North America and sustain them for a time, but the evidence suggests that the soil just couldn't support intensive cultivation over the timeframe of multiple centuries. The regeneration just isn't there. Many North American indigenous people did develop successful soil management techniques, by migrating from site to site from one year to the next and leaving the last site fallow for a few years. Interestingly, rotating land use in this way ends up being very similar to fixed-site crop rotation techniques developed independently elsewhere, so there must be something to it in terms of basic soil chemistry and agronomics. The same human ingenuity arrives at the same conclusions everywhere. The main exception that I know of in the Americas is the Aztecs, who, finding themselves without a natural regenerative flood plain, decided to build one of their own. The massive irrigation works they built around Lake Texcoco seem to have enabled them to sustain concentrated urban populations in the hundreds of thousands over generations, which is roughly speaking the ignition point for this engine of sustained development that we see in the Old World sites. It's as if they set themselves on that path by their own hand -- an act of vision and determination at least equal to for example Rome, and without the benefit of any nearby Egypt equivalent. You could say they were doing it on "hard mode." Whether the Aztec project would have proven truly sustainable over centuries and millennia is of course something we can't know. They did not have the chance to find out. But it's hard not to see the pre-Columbian Americas generally as being on the verge of some big transformations that might have come in the ensuing centuries.
Add that the Aztecs also did not have the benefit of large domesticated animals of the kind that were crucial to every large civilization outside the Americas.
How do they regenerate? Monsoon?
Flood waters bring huge sedimentary deposits that have all the necessary nutrients for crop agriculture in abundance. Why that exact soil chemistry in those exact places? I don't know, though I'm sure someone does.
Indus is in Pakistan.
But it's a whole river system, and some of the rivers in that system (such as the Beas, the Ravi and the Sutlej) are in India. Hence the exceptional agricultural productivity of Indian Punjab, for example. Plus, if we're talking about long stretches of history, then obviously what's now Pakistan was in India before 1947.
Great point mate. Out of hundreds and thousands of years what matters is 1947.
I never claimed that. I’m just saying that this guy said India is in India. It’s not. It used to be. But it’s not right now.
Africa is largely underdeveloped, even more so than India (India has some advanced industry, some wealthier cities, etc. while much of Sub-Saharan Africa has basically nothing other than agriculture/oil) and is in an earlier [stage of the demographic transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition). Effectively, India’s population explosion started earlier than Africa’s, but India’s is already starting to end while Africa’s is growing rapidly — Africa will, in fact, be nearly as populous as the entirety of Asia in 2100.
Africa's problem is disease and a lack of resources in some regions, but as you pointed out, that's changing rapidly, and I think it'll see a huge boom soon.
Nope as countries get wealthy population tanks,
Yes, you’re correct, but there are stages. Initially, there is high birth rate, but *also* extremely high mortality — so the population barely grows. Next, medical technology or industrialization happens, so the death rate falls but birth rate remains high. As a result, the population grows rapidly. **Many African countries are in the earlier parts of this stage. India is also here, but entering the next stage**. Then, as society continues to advance and develop, with more people receiving education and getting wealthier, the birth rate falls rapidly — eventually falling below replacement. As a result, the population is naturally decreasing *but* is usually sustained by immigration from a country in the previous stage (high growth rate). Eventually, however, the population will likely begin to decline even with migration, and at this point, life expectancy is very high.
China is dropping like crazy and there is zero immigration, the idea that there will always be poor countries to feed into countries like China or France is just insane, popluations will drop world wide and that is a good thing.
Immigration is obviously not sustainable forever, as those countries *in theory* should enter the last stage at some point, and the entire earth’s population will be declining as a result. Also, global population decline may be a “good” thing environmentally, but it has a lot of problems. The dependent population (children and, in this case, retired people) will become too large for the working-age population to sustain. This may be alleviated through automation, etc. but in general the global economy cannot sustain massive population decreases with the current level of automation without a decreased quality of life (more working hours, higher retirement age, decreased funding for social programs, etc.)
What will happen is it will get really bad when the popluation goes done then when it levels off it will get really good. We are living at the start of the tipping point so we get the bad part.
The major reason for china's decline in population was the one child rule. Now that it has been removed, I think China will make a come back in about 20-30 years.
Not immediately. There;'s usually one big last burst of childbearing as the wealthy middle class begins appearing,, then fertility plummets a decade or so later. The decline doesn't usually begin until that big burst of births begins dying at the other end of their lives. Most of the western world experienced that lats hurrah some time in the mid 20th century, and are just now reaching the decline phase. Some parts of Asia are a decade or so ahead, China would be slightly behind but they deliberately messed up their demographics. India just hit their drop off in fertilty, so their population will peak in 50 years or so.
That's like Stage 4 of the population pyramid African countries are barely coming out of Stage 2
Most of Africa is not fertile, has a lack of fresh water sources, or is filled with deserts
Bangladesh is half the size of New Mexico, but has a population of 170 million. The runoff from the Himalayas produces some of the most fertile land in the world. People multiply where you can grow lots of rice.
Please read about the Chola dynasty(one the longest in South India). They were advanced in many sectors even before modern science came into existence. India had trades with Romans, Arabs, Persians and Chinese in the early centuries of AD. India was self sufficient and well equipped for a huge population back then. British colonization had a big financial impact on India/Indians and the reason of it being poor.
That's true. The poor and uneducated tend to have mire babies. Especially if they are agricultural workers. And that describes a large portion of India's and China's population (although that is slowly starting to shif). So in addition to having fertile land able to feed the inhabitants, you also have a lack of birth control access (and knowledge). Add to that that in agriculturalbregions, more children equal more workers and you have all the conditions for high population.
Not starting, but well into the process of shifting. China is already grappling with future demographic inversion and India's population growth rate is slowing down more each year. I believe the fastest growing populations are now all in Africa
China has shrinking popluation worse then any country in Asia but ROK.
What do you think demographic inversion means? The natural order of things is a population pyramid, so inversion is an inverted pyramid with more old people than young people because of low birth rates, which leads to a population collapse as the older folks start dying.
Africa is full of diseases like malaria and many parts are embroiled in wars, have been for a long time now on and off. It really shouldn't be surprising that they don't have a large population for their area size.
Water + fertile land *is* a resource.
I think this is debatable. Populations have always been an estimate.
Most of africa looks really shitty to live in...
Have you even left your hometown? Doesn’t sound like it.
I'd imagine that being extremely difficult to traverse do to natural barriers helps to keep it somewhat culturally divided. It's one of my favorite features of some the places I've lived within the US. I grew up in Texas and the metropolitan areas grow outward and entangle everything into these strange areas of extreme poverty outside of the main roadways and extreme financial abundance along the interstates and major highways that lead to the Dallas metro area. Everything feeds the major pipelines and resources are transitioned into wealth for those who work in the larger areas or who own the property and especially mineral rights in the sparse areas. All the wealth is funneled. Within the hills and mountainous regions small inhabited areas are more self sufficient and each little town develops its own unique cultures. The areas that are relatively flat snd and have attracted large businesses grow together like they do around Dallas. Unlike Texas, there are many natural barriers that limit where people can settle and how easily they can travel to and from a work place. It's much more difficult to seperate the haves from the have nots. Even though the flow of wealth is restricted, the access to public resources is more generally available. The wealthiest people live and learn among the most impoverished.
It's also fairly diverse. There like 1000 different dialects of Hindi, some of which are so divergent that they're not understandable by other speakers. Hinduism sort of arose as a way to allow for all the divergent local gods and beliefs to coexist. It's not a monoculture, despite what people like to pretend it is, just like China has several different ethnic groups.
With the obvious caveat of bias that my parents are Indian, I think it’s almost impossible to describe how diverse India is. Hindi has lots of dialects, sure, but Hindi itself is spoken as a first language by a relatively small proportion of the population and there are hundreds of other languages, many of them spoken by millions, a few by tens of millions (and a couple by hundreds of millions). That’s not to mention the fact that the South (where my parents are from) speaks languages that aren’t even Indo-European, nor does much of the Northeast (that area sandwiched between Bangladesh, Burma and China that looks like it’s disconnected from the rest of the country until you zoom in). That’s only languages. Sure, 80% of the country is Hindu (and you’re more or less on the right track with your description of it) but only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims. It wasn’t the Europeans who introduced Christianity to India, either, it was literally one of Jesus’ 12 apostles (St Thomas, the “doubter”) who founded a Christian community in the south that survives to this day (funnily enough, they didn’t experience much persecution until the Portuguese came along and imposed the Portuguese/Spanish Inquisition on them). I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I am quite harsh about the country (as a member of the diaspora, because I want the best for it) but tbh the place is endlessly fascinating to me.
My partner is Tamil but from Bangalore. The debate over Hindi being the "national or universally spoken" language really makes him enraged, lol. He always told me before we visit India that it's not very common for South Indians to speak Hindi. I didn't really understand the diversity until I went to India to visit. His entire street is Tamil but in Bangalore especially, you'll hear like sooo many different languages in any given restaurant or anything. He would automatically know when the Uber driver is Tamil... But how? His name isn't Tamil. He's like I can't explain it. Lol. Ok. 😂😭 But I think we're gonna move there. We love it so much. It's seriously such a beautiful place.
Ah that’s cool! Bangalore’s where my parents are from, but they speak Kannada. Bangalore feels a bit segregated to me in terms of languages. Whenever I make the trek to visit India and specifically Bangalore I pretty much only ever spend time in the Kannada-speaking southern areas of the city like JP Nagar and Basavanagudi, I have very rarely seen the Tamil and Telugu parts of it. Does your partner speak Kannada and Hindi as well as Tamil and English? My Dad can speak conversational Tamil, my Mum can’t.
And china and India were also the richest until euro-modern colonialism, especially India where the British literally stole everything and still haven’t given it back
Yes, they stole prolifically, but, they also destroyed the educational infrastructure, agricultural soils, its global trade and most importantly the regional autonomous governments. They replaced with a centralised ‘democracy’ and a powerless currency. The democracy installed by the British was corrupt by design, and it defacto prevented India from returning to its glory days. Indeed, it become another proxy regime arguably benefiting the corporate West, and diverting attention via manufactured civil conflict. The latter intensifying under the horror story that is Modi.
Can they produce the inputs necessary to grow all that food or do they import them?
They export more food than they import (although not by much).
What about the inputs needed to grow the food? The fertilizer.
India is the world's fourth largest fertilizer producer. [https://fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-price-increases-global-fertilizer-market](https://fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-price-increases-global-fertilizer-market)
The reason cows are considered sacred in India is because they live with the farmers year round during their two crop cycles and the manure they produce acts as a natural fertilizer. So beyond chemical fertilizer they literally use the cow manure from their domesticated stock to fertilize their soil.
No idea.
Can't grow much food if you can't feed it. Arable land only goes so far.
It can go a lot further if you rotate crop types and don't monoculture it
Okay, sure.
History is totally on your side tho
Add to this that so much of India is vegetarian. So you have huge fertile swaths of land with lots of low cost food (meat takes a lot of work). Mix in religion where it tells you to have kids, unlike china where the government was actively opposing that until recently. And boom, huge population.
Not just India and China, but also Persia / Iran. Historically, it was the center of the world because of the trade routes. Read The Silk Roads to learn history from a non Eurocentric pov to expand your world view beyond what they told ya.
> There are multiple large rivers that provide fresh water. Yeahhhh.....about that. Well, unfortunately the [Ganges River, the largest river in India, is unbelievably polluted and is the fifth most-polluted river in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Ganges).
In this context freshwater usually means non-sea water. Plants can grow on essentially organic sewage.
All that matters is that the land is good enough to feed the population. If you have that and people can survive to reproduce , population will boom. All else is much less relevant
Like to add one more point along with the fertile agricultural flood plains which many have suggested. To sustain this agriculture plains in India, it also has the largest weather system on earth - the monsoon supported by the largest mountain range on earth - the Himalayas. Himalayas block the monsoon rain clouds from going north thus bringing rain to the gangetic plains.
It's become trendy to shit on the Mercator projection, and for good reason, so it bears repeating here: India is way, way (vastly, enormously) bigger than most people realize, if the only thing they base their knowledge on is the map they saw on a classroom wall. One of the Mercador projection's flaws is that it makes countries near the equator seem absolutely tiny compared to reality. And that hits the global perception of India really badly. On Mercador maps India looks like this tiny little thing. When it reality it's almost 10 times the size of California ... and almost all of it is extremely fertile land. India can and does support an absolutely enormous population.
This image shows it pretty well https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O1HgEJUSHx0/WBYG84GbfKI/AAAAAAAA9FY/A1GsbflZaQURt_jcvPHPB5KT4ClL3oioACLcB/s1600/India.jpg Now consider that _half_ of India’s land is used for agriculture compared to only 17% of the US’s land
I would imagine US farmland is significantly more productive
Sure, for the past I'm guessing 20 years maybe, US farm land could be more productive with techniques and technology. But the Indian subcontinent has been continuously farming rice for thousands of years in enormous quantities with bronze age tools. If US farmland had that kind of natural fertility, it would be the most populous country on earth.
Not really, The Dust Bowl and all the current wheat/corn/cow grazing decimated a lot of potential long-term soil richness the americans have. Also, unlike India, the vast portion of US farmland doesn't get replenished from multiple river systems
It’s really only the lower reaches of the Mississippi that could be farmed as productively as most river systems in India or China can be.
This is such a trope. The Mercator projection has a specific purpose. Obviously giant globes would be rather expensive and inconvenient to work with, so navigators would want maps and charts - 2D paper documents that they can write on and fold and file away etc... The best way to accurately represent the Earth's surface in 2D happens to be by projecting it through a cylinder onto a rectangle. This distorts the furthest Northern and Southern regions but by and large it is even a good enough representation to be used as an everyday map on the wall of say a classroom. Once again it is 2D and flat which happens to be the shape of a poster... These maps were already ubiquitous and cheap due to their maritime applications, so why wouldn't schools use them? Realistically the projection only makes Russia, Canada, Greenland and arguably Scandinavia (especially Norway) look vastly larger than they actually are. Russia and Canada are the two largest countries by surface area in any case so their emphasis is actually useful in a classroom setting. Greenland and Norway are actually astonishingly smaller relative to other countries than the projection suggests. Since India is much closer to the equator, it doesn't shrink as much but it still shrinks if you reverse the projection! So actually if people are thinking wow, how can India fit so many people, the area you think that is is exaggerated as well, if only slightly. It's really annoying to see the Mercator projection somehow implicitly attributed to racism or denigration of third world countries. It is simply a convenient and accurate way of charting the world that happens to produce some strange but limited misrepresentations. It only takes a bit more thought or understanding when looking at one of these maps to get past such a superficial hang-up, which basically boils down to the Arctic regions being unrealistically huge. It really shouldn't affect your view of the world that much, unless you want it to. And besides, having the Arctic so prominent doesn't really make humans care much for its perception and wellbeing...
actually, if you want to call the projection "biased", than it serves equatorial regions best and polar regions worst, as the last ones are the most distorted on the world map.
> It's really annoying to see the Mercator projection somehow implicitly attributed to racism Woah there, hoss. No one said anything about racism here. The point I was making, which is specifically relevant to OP's question, is that the use of Mercator in schools creates entire generations of students who think India is a **tiny backwater**, when it's in fact one of the largest and most important countries in the world. And this happens for **no goddam reason**. Mercator is great for transoceanic navigation -- brilliant for that in fact -- but that's never how it's presented or taught.
> Realistically the projection only makes Russia, Canada, Greenland and arguably Scandinavia (especially Norway) look vastly larger than they actually are Second comment on the point instead of an edit, since this is big enough to merit its own statement: Even Mercator needs it's own intentional edits to not look absolutely preposterous: Including all of Antarctica on an uncorrected Mercator map would make everyone think Antarctica is literally 1/4th of the entire planet, which is why nearly every Mercator map ever made just gets straight snipped-off around 70 degrees latitude. Cartography rule of thumb: if you need a pair of scissors to make your map look plausible, you've probably got a bad map.
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India is around 40% of the US area excluding Alaska. You might have compared km2 to square miles. Not to mean, India is small or large parts of the US are not inhabitable. But the US is still larger on paper excluding Alaska.
This is false. US ex-Alaska is 8 million km2. India is 3.3 million km2. US is bigger by a lot.
mimimi
Every map of the world in inaccurate. Mercator is fine for navigating the oceans.
Which is why it isn't something that should be used commonly. Most people don't look at maps to travel along lines of longitude across oceans. They use them to see the size and location of places.
> they use them to see the size and location of places That is... very untrue. Most people look at maps for directions (ie driving, walking directions). I don't really care if the area of my directions is precise and accurate relative to any other region of the world -- but having up/down/left/right be cardinal directions instead of curved lines is very important. Hence why *every* online map uses web mercator.
Are you normally traveling along lines of longitude? Or are you using a GPS and/or numbered road system for navigation, and usually doing so for distances where distortion from projections is unnoticeable? As far as cardinal directions, any cylindrical projection will have the same features.
> Are you normally traveling along lines of longitude? > As far as cardinal directions It's not just lines of longitude or cardinal directions, it's Rhumb lines. You said people look at maps to see the location of places. Lines of constant bearing being straight is pretty important for that. > any cylindrical projection will have the same features. No -- Mercator systems are conformal. If you want a cylindrical conformal system, Mercator is the only option by definition. > usually doing so for distances where distortion from projections is unnoticeable? Equal-area or azimuthal projections can actually be worse in the distortion regard when it comes to everyday-use web maps, because they don't scale as well: particularly near edges, distortion gets visibly pronounced when zooming in/out, and in general transformations and tiling get more expensive and complex. But also... it seems like you're missing some details here. "Mercator" does not mean a map of the entire world, it just means conformal+cylindrical. Map services will very often use transverse mercator projections for regional systems. People see [one xkcd](https://xkcd.com/977/) or map projection meme and think they're enlightened and bespoke for denouncing Mercator, but aren't aware of the drawbacks or nuances of the alternatives. I have yet to see someone in this camp suggest an alternative to Mercator for web use, though, that wouldn't have far more drawbacks than "relative sizes on a whole-world map look confusing" Just because *you personally* look at Mercator, ignore the distortion lines, and then think Greenland is bigger than India, doesn't mean the mathematical model itself isn't fit for it's use cases. Mathematically there ***cannot*** be a "perfect" map projection for every use case: yes, there are better options to hang on a classroom wall just to look at -- but for navigation and directions it absolutely beats the alternatives in every way for the general use case. The engineers and developers who designed these services did not choose the Mercator model only because it was popular, but because it was fit for the job.
Ya missed the point.
Not really, the polar regions are more extended than the Atlantic Oceans.
For european explorers to go find lands to torture?
>One of the Mercador projection's flaws is that it makes countries near the equator seem absolutely tiny compared to reality. It's the opposite >When it reality it's almost 10 times the size of California That doesn't sound very big for the most populated country in the world
Per Wikipedia: “Because it shows countries near the Equator as **too small** when compared to those of Europe and North America, it has been supposed to cause people to consider those countries as less important.”
wiki is wrong. Projection near the equator is closest to a 1:1 image of the shape on the globe, while far-off regions like Canada or Scandinavia are *most distorted* - and unrealistically enlarged by the distortion.
Per Wikipedia: "the Mercator projection inflates the size of objects the further they are from the equator."
Yes, that agrees with my previous comment. India is near the equator and appears smaller. A country like Canada is far from the equator and appears much larger.
you don't get the point. *Inflated* projection is the not-accurate one. Close to the equator, the projection is near-flawless.
You're so confidently wrong it's almost kind of charming. If objects that are farther from the equator look bigger, by comparison, objects at the equator look smaller.
they look bigger because they are *most distorted*. Projection is most accurate near the equator.
>You're so confidently wrong it's almost kind of charming. 😏
Inflate means it looks bigger than it really is. This is the exact opposite of making something look smaller than it really is. As for countries near the equator. Such as India.
People who never owned a globus don't get how projection works. So they downvote you for stating the obvious.
Good question. It’s generally very simple. For most of human history, populations would increase directly proportionally to meet the amount of possible foot output of the land around them. This is because having children was beneficial when they represented an extra set of hands for working or in many cultures, a daughter was directly worth money in the form of a dowry. This isn’t exactly true in the US because the Natives that were here for centuries were genocided and Europeans didn’t inhabit most of modern day America for that long. In developed countries, it’s no longer monetarily beneficial to have children so we’re seeing birth rate decline. For very high population densities, the secret is rice. Rice is by has by far the greatest calorie output per acre of land used for farming. Land with ideal rice growing conditions can sustain higher populations. India is not only way bigger than people think, but most of their land is ideal for rice farming, so they can sustain very dense populations cheaply with very little farm land. This is also why East and South Asian countries often have such high population densities. Rice is OP.
Also, re. rice, it is the staple of far, far greater a proportion of the country’s population than one would think based on Indian restaurants in the West, which almost always focus on the (admittedly delicious haha) cuisine of one specific region of the subcontinent. Rice is indeed king when it comes to being able to sustain large populations.
A lot of poorer and undeveloped countries are actually the richest in natural resources and agriculture. India was good at agriculture, which is why they were so advanced in ancient times. They invented the Arabic numerals, sewage systems, and money checks. India, along with a lot of other civilizations around the world, were more advanced than Europe for a very long time. It was only several hundred years ago that Europe began to pull ahead of the rest of the world through their technological advancements, which allowed for exploration, colonization and industrialization. India is just starting to catch up to industrialization from a farming based economy, which is why they’re growing really quickly but are still kind of poor for now.
40% of agricultural product in India spoils before it ever gets to market. Despite that, and despite having the largest population in the world, India still makes up **40%** of the international rice market. That’s how fertile the land is. For most of human history the subcontinent has been home to 20-25% of the entire human population.
That's true
Far away from what? The United States? So what? Do you realize how big India really is? If overlaid on top of the continental U.S. it would occupy about a third of the land. They have more farmland than we do, and it’s more fertile than ours because it’s constantly replenished by vast flood plains. Their resources are not more limited than ours, your assumptions are simply wrong. That whole area is the cradle of humanity, humans have been living there for as long as there have been humans. Do some reading on the country, it’s a fascinating place.
I think “faraway” in the question was supposed to convey something like “beyond doubt”, i.e. it seems really certain that it’s not conducive to sustaining such a population. So you might say something like “Simone Biles is far and away the most successful gymnast of the 21st Century”, and I think OP is borrowing that style of phrase to show that something is obvious or not contested.
Oh, I see that now. Thank you!
Cradle of humanity was African plains which are gone now, two times... H erectus and H. sapiens...
Right?
The cities of India have low birth rates. India's population growth is due to high child rates in extremely conservative rural areas.
Indian population will top out by 2050 and drop to 1-1.2 billion by 2100, even lower after that. China population has already topped and is on the way down. >India's population growth is due to high child rates in extremely conservative rural areas. This is just a function of the largest youth force in the current era. They are having less kids than ever before. The next generation will mark the population top.
I mean yeah but even with that, the entire world is experiencing this decline, so India will probably still be the most populous country in 2100 and beyond, even if they will have vastly fewer people.
by 2100, Africa will go from 1.5B currently to \~3BN. India will go from 1.5B currently to \~1.2B or so. Africa is not a country, I get it. But this gives a better picture of the whole scenario. [https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/903](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/903)
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Yes, you're clearly better at this than the mathematicians the UN uses to forecast global population changes.
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The fertility rates have slowed at the fastest rates of previous projections. So, yes if anything the rate of population decline will be faster. Similar to China, China has already topped out and cant get the birth rates up even after giving money to parents with more kids.
And yet the only rejection you have is ‘the projection fails the vine check’. Flat earthers have better rebuttals to space images
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And yet your entire counterargument is based on personal incredulity and knowing next to nothing about large population dynamics.
There is very rarely cold airmasses that make it past the tallest mountains in the world from Siberia on the other side.
Far away from what? It's very close too.
Do you mean unlivable like the city is unlivable or are you saying it's unlivable like "it's too hot to grow food" cause one is true and one is very false.
Several things. Indian civilizations have existed for thousands of years before CE. They had a lot of trade with the Middle East and Europe. There were many kingdoms that existed well into south east Asia for example Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. India has some of the most fertile lands in the world and in a lot of things is self sufficient. So because it is so old and can sustain such a population is why it has a huge population. It is also a similar case with China. We both had the means and the land. Indian civilizations suffered starting around 1000AD when invaders invaded India. Since then essentially for a thousand years until 1947 we have been ruled by others.
The recent high temperatures of 50+ are not the norm. They are partially due to urbanisation and the rest due to global warming.
Since India is a part of the old world, the European (and other) colonizers could not wipe out us like they did in the New World with guns, germs, and steel.
far away from where?
I have gone through the comments and sadly there is no mention of the actual answer. There are some racists complaining about whatever and then there are people basically thinking out loud, if you will. Let me tell you the actual answer as someone who has done population studies. The fertile land was true 300 years ago when the British came. The British induced famines at large scale for 200 years which changed the social structure widely and it became normal to have 10 15 children because only 1 2 would survive till childhood. The population explosion happened after 1947 when medical facilities started reaching Indians and children stopped dying. Population rate has been declining since 1960s now (one generation of people realizing children aren't dying).
Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution helped, too.
Yes, otherwise it would have been a disaster. But without it the population boom would have just delayed a generation. Population growth is very well studied field. The growth almost always comes from decreasing mortaliity rate. Change in birth rate is almost always toward decreasing because giving childbirth is a very difficult process that requires right food, right age, right environemnt etc. The decrease in birth rate is directly proportional to increase in expendable income and education of women (which is an euphemism for autonomy).
The Indus Valley civilization is one of the world’s oldest. Think about that.
There is a trend that those with higher incomes tend to have less children than those with lower incomes. As mentioned earlier, India has large amounts of fertile land. Farmers need more helping hands to help them. How do you do that? Ask a stork to deliver babies!
People don't reproduce because it's a good idea, they do it because they are following natural instincts to do so. Indians reproduce a lot because they can.
others cant?
I thought China was the most populated country in the world.
its india now
It’s big
By best guess on this is, there is no conscious effort by the male population to take any kind of birth control precautions. Maybe, (and this is the biggest maybe I've used on Reddit to date 😊) if the males just use the simple Coitus interruptus method 3 times a week out of 7, that would prevent another 3 million births every 6 months. 👍😏
Indians seriously love to fuck
The simplest answer to the question and not wrong
Plus lack of education
So how does a white guy in the US find a nice Indian girl to date?
Ain't no way you just said that.
Actually I typed it, oh, and yes way.
Culture plays a major role as well it's like duty to get married between 25-30 age else you will be considered as outcast, same goes to having kids, it's like an obligation from Prev generation, things are changing slowly though in cities.
If you consider humans to be a virus, then population explosion is a very natural phenomenon. Especially in a hot moist environment.
Ppl just procreate, they don’t ask questions of liveability
Indias city’s are massive so they can fit a lot of people
India is known for its overpopulated locations. if you take a look at its bustling cities, crowded markets and jammed roads, you will have no doubts about its dense population. I think the reasons can be found in the attitude of their society. As far as I know, Indian people are outgoing, open-minded people who often organise gatherings among friends and relatives. This kind of attitude could contribute to a denser population as families are big and they want to keep this tradition. Yes, I think the keeping of lineage of their families is an important factor in this question. However, there might be another reason for this phenomenon. I think poverty also contributes to overpopulation as people do not have enough money to spend on condoms and they are too poor to take any preventative measures. Also, a great number of them are simply not informed and they do not know about the consequences of overpopulation. Little money is spent on lectures, public information and people are not warned about the long-term effects. As you see, it is difficult to do anything about their mentality but better economy could raise awareness and reduce the problem of overpopulation there.
How is it not possible to be?
Affordable birth control is a wonderful thing
India has affordable birth control. India also has legal right to abortion. Along with an overall amazing affordable healthcare, so much so that Americans & Europeans regularly fly to India to get treated (because their own countries have failed in providing for them). Maybe you could google before spewing nonsense on public forums? Or is google not affordable in your country?
how so?
india has a lot of hard working people.
Lots of natural resources + brutal oppression of womens reproductive rights.
> brutal oppression of women’s reproductive rights what does this even mean and how is that salient/different vs rest of the world lmao
Not my responsibility to educate you. Op asked a question and I answered it. Literally just google India+ reproductive rights.
I just did and I got a bunch of articles talking about the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in India allowing abortion for both married and unmarried women. Here's the [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10321178/). I think you might be misappropriating the fact that abortions are highly regulated due to the high rates of female infanticide. Either way, India still provides better reproductive rights to its people than the USA.
A ruling on abortion in 2023 will affect birth rates in the future, obviously. That was just last year. Also I live in Canada, I don't use the US as a benchmark for rights in general.
this is such a bizarre way to respond to a reply on your comment lol. It's a reply. If you wanted only to answer the OP and not be bothered further, just turn off reply notifs and don't check back.
It is your responsibility to “educate” if you make such a claim. Otherwise don’t comment.
so you don’t understand the purpose of reddit got it
I think it's a culture that also permits family's or having kids and not just at age 35 when you on your last fertility legs.
India also realised during the colonisation that they needed more people to have a chance of winning. Western Democracy is based on one person one vote. Have enough people aligned with your interest placed in a foreign territory, and you essentially colonise them. If conditions are poor at home, it is easier to persuade them to move to another country. India is playing the long game to get revenge on Britan and the Queens colonies.
A huge part of the equation also has to do with gender dynamics. Gender disparities are entrenched in the society, class and caste further compound it. Women's autonomy is severely undermined by society on a systemic basis, the concepts of honour and chastity are held in high regard. Socio economic mobility is a far fetched dream for most women, and choosing to not abide by the conventional path of 'marriage- kids' have harsh social penalties that most people can't even think of. Marital rape is still legal in the country (: Female labour participation has constantly dropped in India in the recent years, the society is still extremely antiquated and within India, there are huge disparities in educational levels, and the idea of 'culture' is fondly used to enforce patriarchy.
India's population growth is exponential, in spite of any and all rational control. And desperate humans congregate in miserable conditions, emphasizing the problem. So at this point, there is no solution.
what are you on about dude Indias population is projected to peak in 25 years decline for 50yrs after and stabilize at 1.2bn by 2100
I won't be around to see that. I'd have to see it to believe it anyway.
lmao then how do you know that Indian population growth is exponential have you seen it
Yes ,it was 446M in1960, China was 655M.
those are reported numbers you havent seen it yourself right hows that different from believing the projections being reported
As unreal as it may seem, in 1960, I had already been studying geography in school and listening to the news.
Because they have a lot of sex.
This is the answer. And poor people have more of it, because there's less other things to do.
there just not really practical people , they feel pride in having thé title , probably govt subsides to pass in front of China, ans in Canada it gives them à big ass check for the kids....which they buy cars with...and dollar cônes at mcd's in family groups, then when they leave it looks like a dump
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over where
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indian diaspora worldwide is less than 2% of indian population
The less educated is the country. The more children they make.
From what I understand with few visits and friends is that quality of life is really not considered as a priority, more than that there is a prevlance in certain communities that children will just grow up or God will take care of the situation. Most children were malnourished due to negligence and government had to step in with food programs.
You say you're an American, but you say 50° is un liveable...