Comment by belowavgiq
20 days ago
India's ongoing growth, and overall the positive sentiment of the population, is such a breath of fresh air compared to the decadent west. I have had a few friends from there for almost a decade and the improvement has been huge. It's just a shame that you are also speedrunning population collapse. Modi completely ignoring the cratering birth rates under him is a real hero.
We are 1.48 billion people (and growing) in a nation that is 1/3rd the size of the US. Expected to reach 1.7+ billion in another 20-30 years - which will increase desperation considerably.
The birth rate falling is a VERY good thing. India cannot really support more than 300-400 million people with a high quality of life with its geographic size and exhausted resources. Life becomes cheaper than disposable toilet paper otherwise.
> India cannot really support more than 300-400 million people with a high quality of life with its geographic size and exhausted resources
Source for this carrying capacity?
Glad you asked!
India has roughly ~18% of humanity but only about 4% of global freshwater resources, and agriculture consumes roughly 80–90% of India's water. The World Bank estimates that around 600 million Indians already face water stress. (The number is actually higher in many estimates)
https://www.worldbank.org/en/brief/2026/03/19/how-india-is-a...
There is also substantial pressure on land. Government data report about 97.85 million hectares, or ~30% of India's geographical area, as affected by land degradation/desertification.
https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
If you want long-term, sustainable agriculture, we need to heavily move to organic farming. This yields ~30% less food produce. I forgot the popular paper on this - can dig it up.
India has also exhausted its mineral reserves. This is not fully our fault. We were fully strip mined and utterly bankrupted by the British in WW2. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
(IMHO that is the real reason why we got independence - the Brits didn't want to keep holding to a distressed asset and immediately liquidated. Look at Bengal famine of 1943)
We are having heavy import dependency on minerals - a ridiculous 80%!!! dependency, which is causing significant problems in our trade/current-account deficit.
So, if we want maximum ecological comfort, and long-term, prosperous standard of living, we need a significantly reduced population. You can get the number by just halving our population simply taking into account high-availability to water and then reduce further for sustainable agriculture and sustainable mineral consumption.
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Indians like to blame population for their problems. But India is very big. Mumbai is about as densely populated as Paris.
No, Mumbai is significantly more densely populated than Paris when looking at the entire urban scale and not just a few areas of Paris. This is easily fact-checked.
I mean Mumbai's population is 10x Paris population, so this should be obvious.
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You mean the government actively scapegoating Muslims/minorities for all their problems? The Hindu nationalist party that has street militias (RSS, Bajrang Dal), anti-minority lynchings and press / university crackdowns? Sounds like a "breath of fresh air" for those on the right side of things
This is just a list of talking points with no basis in reality.
So the lynchings are just made up?
That's just meme spread by left-leaning media in the west, (and their cronies in certain Indian mainstream media outlets) who can't tolerate anyone developing a national identity.
A national identity where one group is superior to another is a disgusting ideology to defend
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Who's not speed running that right now? I can't really fault India in particular when it's nearly universal.
You said it yourself, nearly, so it's not something written in stone.
I can fault India (and, in particular, Modi) for repeating the same mistake all other western developed countries made 40 years before, yes.
You mean working to prevent unwanted teen pregnancies?
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You mean are making right now? Also not just western developed countries, unless you count Russia, China, Japan, etc. as western.
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I know we have our issues but how blackpilled do you need to be to envy Indians... Something isn't right with this comment.
For one thing, Indians aren't giving hormone inhibitors to their children, Illegal immigration is almost universally viewed as bad, and every 10th girl is not an onlyfans starlet. Indians have better chances of being alright, although they lack a strong leader and will likely remain below China.
Why? What's so bad about India? Their people are young and positive, the west is ancient and past its peak. It's a very simple point actually.
I'm an Indian 1.5 gen immigrant living in the west, and I'm by no means ashamed of my Indian culture or heritage. I would never move to India and I feel sorry for many of my Indian friends or cousins living there. They are too often emotionally stunted people, and held down by India's oppressive work culture.
The one benefit of living in India is cheap household labour...only possible because of a massive underclass of people!
Have you ever been to India? In particular Delhi and Gurugram, and the surrounding manufacturing/industrial areas.
Both of these comments have an inaccurate view of India in either direction, too romanticized or too doomerized. In reality it's just another country with people trying to do what's best for themselves and their families.
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It's in the username
> population collapse
There are 1.2 billion Indians.
It's clearly a massive exaggeration to talk about population collapse, but India has dropped below replacement, and will start seeing a decline in population in the next few decades, so they're heading in the same direction as everywhere else.
But of course that also makes blaming Modi pretty silly - every country sees this happening as their economic and social conditions improves. We don't know of any way of stopping it short of maybe throwing people into poverty.
(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).
I think we do know how to stop it: Welfare Queens, but really. If you can actually "live large" by doing nothing else than raising a bunch of kids (either with some controls that ensure you raise them well, and/or significant structured investment into rearing kids by the state), people will do that.
The reaction to that idea shows you how undervalued baby production still is. Morons insist that $20k or similar is enough incentive. It's laughable.
Whatever happens with AI "taking all the jobs", this will drive real societal change, because it has to. The options are obscene authoritarianism and removal of bodily autonomy from women so we can just force them to reproduce like society is used to, or actually adapting to what it will cost to encourage women to go through literal trauma and 20 years of really hard work because the rest of society will benefit. Seeing as de-facto enslaving all women is horrific, I hope people see that we should do everything to avoid the first option.
It has to become very attractive to be an average person, with average social standing, with average resources. The uber rich might have to give up some of their share of the pie.
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True, let's put it this way then. In some time, there will be 1.2 billion >80 year olds and 100 million people under 18.
You see, I know it's hard to grasp for some, but everything is really relative.
This will in fact not happen. There are no models that result in 90% population depletion in less than 100 years
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> There are 1.2 billion Indians.
Incorrect. It is 1.48 billion and expected to hit 1.7+ billion in next three decades in a nation that is <1/3rd size of the USA. Birth rate collapse cannot come soon enough.
It's not the number of people but the shape of their demographic pyramid that matters.