[cdmckay]

How do you know there's not enough water supplies?

In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of water but it's probably being tied up in industrial applications.

Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to support them, instead of building them where the profit is highest?

Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.

[eurasiantiger]

The problem isn’t that there is no water supply, the problem is that Indian water supplies are incredibly low quality.

Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also play a large part.

[Razengan]

How do you know there will ALWAYS be enough water supplies?

There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet can support.

[jjk166]

An area might run out of water, but the planet won't. The planet would run out of literally everything else before we run out of water.

It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point where you can't expand the population before you get to the point where you can't maintain the population that already exists. If something does decrease the water supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller population to support. Such is the nature of carrying capacity.

[bobthepanda]

Sure, but practically speaking there is a lack of potable freshwater in certain places. You can’t just stick a straw into the Indian Ocean and glug away.

[jjk166]

It's a simple analysis - which is easier: bringing more water to where it is being consumed or moving the consumers to the water. In a wealthy area with a lot of stuff going for it, maybe a desalination plant makes perfect sense. Everyone in the city drinking non-potable water does so because they have judged it more practical than moving to a place with better water infrastructure.

If you get a million people to build a city in the Sahara and don't build any infrastructure to get water to this city, of course they are going to have water shortages, but this does not suggest some global water crisis nor is a limited birth rate going to fix the problem. Likewise if someone sticks their head in a plastic bag they may run out of air, but that doesn't mean air is any less abundant. There are some resources of which there is an actual scarcity such as arable land and energy sources, but water is not one of them.

[bobthepanda]

There's certainly a regional crisis that will only probably get worse as climate change reduces snowpack in the Himalayas, the source of most water in India, China, and SEA. The problem with moving is threefold; moving to countries without water scarcity legally is not a realistic option for most Indians, cities are highly sticky, and new cities are incredibly hard to set up and set up well.

In fact, China is already considered to be suffering from water availability issues, and while this still happened with a one-child policy it almost certainly would be worse had Chinese population growth had the same trajectory as India's. (This is not an argument for the general good of one-child policy, and I do not endorse such a thing.)

[jjk166]

The himalayas are the source of water for the region because it is abundant and cheap. Infrastructure to bring water in from more distant sources, desalination plants to generate more fresh water, wastewater treatment plants to recover more water, and changes to water use such as different agricultural methods which conserve water are all options to increase supply.

On the demand side, if moving is not legally or socially acceptable, what is the difficulty of changing the laws or culture? If cities are sticky, move the things that attract people to those cities elsewhere. If new cities are difficult to set up, how difficult is that compared to modifying an existing city?

there's a big difference between "there isn't any water" and "we won't take actions to get water." Now you may be saying "but those things are hard and expensive" to which I will respond "yeah, providing for the needs of 20% of the world's population is going to be hard and expensive," but on the brightside 20% of the world's population is an incredible resource if utilized properly.

[Chris2048]

> It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies

Why does it entail that? And do you mean forced abortions?

[bobthepanda]

Historical precedence isn't exactly kind: https://nypost.com/2016/01/03/how-chinas-pregnancy-police-br...

And no, forced sterilization, as in the surgical procedure to permanently end the ability to conceive, is a thing.

More relevant, historical precedence in India:

> As the fertility rate began to decrease (but not quickly enough), more incentives were offered, such as land and fertilizer. In 1976, compulsory sterilization policies were put in place and some disincentive programs were created to encourage more people to become sterilized. However, these disincentive policies, along with “sterilization camps” (where large amounts of sterilizations were performed quickly and often unsafely), were not received well by the population and gave people less incentive to participate in sterilization. The compulsory laws were removed. Further problems arose and by 1981, there was a noticeable problem in the preference for sons. Since families were encouraged to keep the number of children to a minimum, son preference meant that female fetuses or young girls were killed at a rapid rate.[25]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_(medicine)#Natio...