[carboy]

India does not have a water issue, they have a population issue, but it’s really hard to mange the population, so natural resources are being consumed beyond sustainability.

This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.

[chewz]

This is one point of view.

You could also say that resources of India had been depleted by greed, overexploatation and the lack of proper governanace. You can't run a multimilion city on borewells and groundwater - the government should had built proper infrastructure - pipelines, reservoirs, water meters, sewage treatment plans etc.

In a way India is a minature to the entire world.

[bobosha]

I beg to differ, India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries. They a problem of population distribution. Like many developing nations, populations cluster in large cities leading to pressures on resources.

[thaumasiotes]

> India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries.

I went down worldpopulationreview.com's list; I'll post my list annotated with country size as a reply to this comment.

Findings:

India, the country, is #28. It has essentially equal population density to the Netherlands (#29, in Europe!), while being a modest 87 times larger. Belgium (#33) has only slightly less density, and India is merely 102 times bigger.

The next European country down is England at #50. It's much closer to the size of India -- 8% as large -- and has two-thirds the density.

Pakistan is #55; it's about four times the size of England with comparable density.

#59 is Germany; it's less than half the size of Pakistan with comparable density. Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who you might have thought would have super-high density, are equal to Germany. (Monaco and Vatican City really do have super-high density.)

The only other country-sized European countries in the top 70 are Switzerland and Italy, #68 and #69. They have half the density of India. Italy is a tenth of India's size. Switzerland is slightly larger than the Netherlands.

Bangladesh, by the way, is #12, with more than double the density of India (in about 1/20 of the space).

So I can't agree that India's population density is comparable to "many Western European countries". It's comparable to a couple of diminutive European countries. Equal density over 100 times the area is not what you would expect; it's something very unusual about India.

In fact, we can just compare the regions directly. Europe has 743 million people in 10 million square kilometers of land for an average density of 74.3 people per square km. India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) has 1740 million people in 4 million square km, for an average density of over 400 people per square km (roughly equal to the density of India the country, which makes sense), about 6 times the figure for Europe.

[thaumasiotes]

Areas are taken from Wikipedia, with water area removed where Wikipedia lists water area. This list is the full top 30 "countries" plus whoever I thought was of interest down to #70. Many areas are rounded.

     1. Macau               30 square km
     2. Monaco               2.2
     3. Singapore          720
     4. Hong Kong        1,070
     5. Gibraltar            6.7
     6. Bahrain            778
     7. Vatican City         0.44
     8. Maldives           298
     9. Malta              316
    10. Sint Maarten        37
    11. Bermuda             39
    12. Bangladesh     138,000
    13. Palestine        5,800
    14. Saint-Martin        53
    15. Mayotte            374
    16. Barbados           439
    17. Lebanon         10,300
    18. Taiwan          36,000
    19. Mauritius        2,000
    20. Aruba              179
    21. San Marino          61
    22. South Korea    100,000
    23. Nauru               21
    24. Saint Barthelemy    25
    25. Rwanda          25,000
    26. Comoros          1,659
    27. Tuvalu              26
    28. India        2,970,000
    29. Netherlands     34,000
    30. Israel          21,000
    33. Belgium         29,000
    37. Japan          365,000
    47. Vietnam        310,000
    50. United Kingdom 239,000
    55. Pakistan       860,000
    59. Germany        357,000
    68. Switzerland     40,000
    69. Italy          294,000

[chmod775]

Most european countries have highly cultivated land and are industrialized through and through. It might go faster nowadays, but it took them hundreds of years to get there. Turning the middle of nowhere into arable land doesn't happen over night in any case.

This makes them able to efficiently provide for their population with the land they have available. India has some way to go in that respect.

This is not accounting for differences in geography or resources - like water - that are directly limited unless you want to build infrastructure for artificial water purification too.

[gingabriska]

Not all land is livable. And more land becomes livable if the population residing on them have more resources.

Many places in Scandinavia go below -20c and people live there because they've means to heat up the spaces where they live.

People are surviving in dessert where there is no natural water because they've built sea water planets.

[mrcode007]

https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/

[Ayesh]

I suppose it's more of the density than the population. India is massive by all measurements, but west and east sides are completely different. In the west, you have Mumbai, a city full of dust, slums, and millions of people riding trains in a single evening, all fighting for resources.

East side, is full of greenery, rainforest, and a peaceful living with hardly any population compared to west.

[jussij]

There is no doubt population an economic growth will be putting pressure on the water situation in India.

But at least for this year, the climate also seems to have played a very big part in the issue:

https://weather.com/en-IN/india/monsoon/news/2019-06-03-indi...

The Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) revealed that more than 42% of the country’s area is abnormally dry, which is 6% more than that of the previous year.

... as many as 26 out of 36 meteorological subdivisions in India have recorded deficit rainfall. This is the second driest pre-monsoon that the country has witnessed ever since 1954.

[chmod775]

> but it’s really hard to mange the population

China managed in a similar situation. I think it may be harder to fight people for resources, or just reducing their resource use, than making sure they are never born.