[jdonaldson]

I always thought watersheds were a great way of defining state-level regions. They're more stable than boundaries set by rivers, and are more natural than arbitrary lines of latitude/longitude. In the (near) future, there's going to be a lot of hand wringing over who has what rights to which water. The only way to completely solve it is to have one region be in control of the entire course of the water's flow.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/m...

Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem. But, it sounds like that in the future their drinking water is going to come from careful management of groundwater, which will require a lot of state level agreements. Right now, I'm not optimistic those agreements will happen smoothly.

[amrx431]

> Granted, redrawing the map based on watershed doesn't solve India's problem

Thats a recipe for political disaster. Identity based politics is the only paradigm of politics in India. Currently southern states in India are organised on linguistic identity and every now and then there are statements from main-stream politicians calling for secession and establishing a separate country to counter the influx for North Indians who are painted as separate racial and ethnic group by these politicians. Breaking up existing units of governance organised on the linguistic identity will add fuel to the fire of separatism and powers like China and Pakistan will be more than happy to assist the separatists movement that starts because of this stupidity. BTW this is the wet dream of Pakistan and China as to India's future. Be noted the human cost a separatist movement will cause. India's bulk of fighting forces is made up by youths from north India. Do this and we have a Syria or Bangladesh with a scale of 1 billion plus people.

[ahamedirshad123]

What are you smoking? That's what happen when you try to impose your language on us through some education policies. That's what happens when you remove the Tamil name with some name in a language somewhat foreign to us.

And calling us racists? Who coined the name madarasi for South Indians? It's the north of Vindhya.

[dang]

Posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how provocative another comment was or you felt like it was. Please make your substantive points without personal attacks and flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[amrx431]

I dont know as to why you would infer that I am calling a couple of hundreds of million people racist. I will restate what my assertion is. Identity politics is the political paradigm in India. Majority of the populace in India votes on basis of identity, caste, creed or religion. The linguistic identity of people is the best and only identity politics that is there. Now if reorganisation of Indian states on basis of water considerations will lead to situations were politicians will exploit and portray the reorganisation as imperialistic designs of north Indian hegemonies of Hindi and Hindutva policies even though the policy will be based on water considerations. Add to this the influx of Chinese and Pakistani influences and situation may get worse and we might have a humanitarian crisis on our hand.

And I do reiterate that I am not against linguistic units of governance.

And also this is the worst case scenario but nevertheless a scenario. All depends upon how our politicians portray these to citizens and when it comes to politicians, we never know.

[selimthegrim]

Delimitation of LS by population was frozen in 1976 and will remain so until 2026. North will be favored by population even then. Why not redistrict anyway?

[krageon]

Let's take a moment and remember that a lot of the bad aspects of what happened to India after the brits left was because they divided up the country and then washed their hands in innocence. Now you propose to do it again. Why? It did not work well last time, and somehow you imagine dividing it along the lines of a single relatively minor (as in it's eminently solvable, not because it has little impact) problem that it will go better now.

I don't follow your reasoning about this at all.

[jdonaldson]

FWIW, this isn't something I'm advocating for India alone. We're running out of water all over the world : https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/10-cities-most...

[thaumasiotes]

Watersheds may be a little too large to work well as administrative regions.

[jdonaldson]

Here's the watershed basins and sub-basins for India, which looked reasonable to me at a glance : https://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/river-basin-and-su...

[chii]

or go all in, and establish a world government. I think a single governing body is the only true way forward for humanity, if humanity is to move beyond earth and be a space faring civilization.

[omeid2]

That is a sure fire way of endless corruption and an ultimate authoritarian regime. No checks and balances and no place to run away.

[whatshisface]

By world government, do you mean you want America to take over the world, or do you want to be 50% ruled by China and 50% ruled by America?

[FerretFred]

Talking of space faring .. according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organi..., the Indian Space Research Organisation budget of 11,538.26 crore (US$1.7 billion)(2019–20 est.) would buy a lot of water infrastructure, but that's obviously not as exciting as going to Space..

[yrro]

All the infrastructure you can built won't solve the fundamental problem: humans are taking water out of the ground faster than it can be replenished, and there are more of them taking more and more water each year. Eventually the train will plow through the buffers...

[kkarakk]

ISRO provides and interprets a lot of meteorological data crucial for the agrarian economy of India amongst other things. ISRO is mostly focused on activities that benefit India in the now(launching higher resolution meteorological satellites/cooperating with EU on launch vehicles) vs countries like the US/China that focus on the future(spacelabs/spacex/mars mission etc)