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And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality o

And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b). Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe. The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams.

mschuster91 6y ago
> Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams. "Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy". The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  Are you sure you’re disagreeing with the parent poster? It sounds to me like you’ve just outlined a plan to achieve the same goal.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    The parent poster advocated for a one-child policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372090
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > "Population management" is a road leading You can say that about anything: socialist policies, "no-tolerance" policies, anything that looks like censorship. You say there have been many such example, then trot out Nazi Germany; The fact the Nazis purposefully initiated a genocide (the holocaust) out of hatred out the Jews undermines the suggestion that there was a genuine attempt at population management. Chinas also has a pretty poor human rights example, aside from it's 1-child policy. Do you have any example of a modern (first-world, developed) country with a good human-rights record, and QOL index pursuing population management?
jhowell 6y ago
> And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions that will further isolate the United States due to xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate. How long before "their" water born illnesses become our airborne viruses?
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > to reunite the "kingdom." BS. They just don't want to be part of a new "kingdom". Brexiteers don't trust EU politician, but they also don't trust UK politicians. > My money is on the Chinese Chinese aggression isn't much better than US "xenophobic thinking", plus India has pretty good contacts with Europe and other south-Asian countries. Plus there is a large and influential Indian population in the US, I'd be surprised in The Indian population in China are half as influential.
- apatters 6y ago
  This seems like a comment by someone who lacks a basic knowledge of Indian/Chinese relations but has an axe to grind against America. India and China are constantly saber rattling over turf wars and other geopolitical issues, and India withdrew from the recent Chinese-led RCEP free trade agreement over concerns that China would compromise their economic sovereignty. India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say, German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario where things change for the better and neither China nor America is involved whatsoever.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    India has more than enough smart people to design and build everything they need. Labor is cheap there too, so they can dig in pipes everywhere cheaply. The things that need to be done are public knowledge or easy to find out. Most of the west already does it, and has been for one hundred years or so. There is nothing magical about turning bad water into clean drinkable water. All that India is lacking is the will (probably because of money or corruption - both real problems).
betwixthewires 6y ago
You talk about fixing water infrastructure like it is really hard (so hard you need the British to do it) and your alternative is to eliminate a significant potion of the population? You think that is easier? Not to even talk of the ethical concerns or the unintended consequences, just from a logistical standpoint, your statement is absurd. There is no way that is is easier to reduce a human population than it is to increase water availability. I don't usually attack people (and technically I'm only criticizing your statement, not attacking you directly) but when malthusians start talking I immediately know that they don't know what they're talking about. And on an ethical note, managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
- imtringued 6y ago
  If you fix the problem today one day there will be 3 billion indians and you have to fix the problem again. It's much easier to reduce their reproduction rate through education and that education comes with other benefits.
  - betwixthewires 6y ago
    People don't just have kids en masse without a reason. People historically had lots of kids for 2 reasons: a lot of them died before reaching reproductive age, and they needed more hands to produce food because most people lived in a subsistence agriculture environment. The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in child mortality, that and development from agricultural to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in reducing the number of kids a woman has. Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then becomes to have less kids. You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the west during development into industrial economies and yet the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic pressures. A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate. At that rate population does not increase. Long story short, at least in cities (where the water shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility. So the shortages you see of water and other resources can be entirely attributed to inefficient resource allocation, and once capacity is increased to match population you won't have to worry about it again and again.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
>The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. india will run out of resources(and water) before population hits a peak. depopulation is a statistical guarantee. reducing population voluntarily is the only way to assure a reasonable stock of the gene pool before the country completely runs out of resources and scarcity escalates into wars of depopulation(historically, it has been proven that war always follows drought or famine on a larger scale..from genghis khan to african tribes to vikings to the last syrian war, if you can collect enough data sets about world famine/droughts/scarcities, wars always follow.) now..how to go about it. its a multi pronged approach: 1. stop incentivising children. what does this mean? instead of punitive measures or coercive one child policy, the state should incentivise responsible procreation and reward the child free. like an UBI for those who dont contribute to population growth. 2. provide free preservation of genetic material(sperm/eggs/dna) in a gene pool databank for posterity. this may not mean anything. it may amount to something. the idea that a 'legacy' might have a chance in a better world through frozen dna is a perk. it is a small cost and a nice gesture to reward selfless action for the nation. also: who knows what we might need in 300-500 years later. 3. go back to village or rural economies. by this, i dont mean that indians should start turning back time wrt sci and tech. what i mean is that people should go back village size communities. these have to be self governing and self sustaining units that can manage their own resources. 4. diversity is a double edged sword. i am not talking about social diversity, but diversity of resource expenditure and resource scarcity. there are too many people in india and to a certain extent, more cohesion and homogeneous living/way of life will give smaller communities more agency over how they manage local resources. example: a meat eating population has a different resource expenditure pattern than a vegetarian/dairy inclusive one. rural communities differ from urban community's needs. droughty areas have different management starategies than those with monsoons. 5. it's very easy wrt water. dig more ponds and save rain water. protect watersheds and prevent ag/industrial runoffs. adopt 'nile valley' model of digging canals. take whatever you grow indoors into hydroponic systems. india still gets a lot of rain during the monsoons. development of rural areas and relieving the pressure in urban density will help. but only if there is a limit on the number of people per resource budgeted zone. 6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted, the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep. they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2] [..]He and his colleagues previously looked at how heat waves would evolve with warming in the Middle East and found that region will likely be home to the highest wet-bulb temperatures the world will see. (Bandar Mahshahr in Iran hit a wet-bulb temperature of nearly 95°F during a 2015 heat wave, which translates to a heat index of about 163°F (73°C).) But South Asia poses the bigger concern in terms of threats to people, as it is home to one fifth of the world’s population and is an area of deep poverty. “That combination is what makes, what shapes this acute vulnerability,” Eltahir said. Eltahir and his colleagues found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95°F threshold by century’s end and most of South Asia will approach that threshold. If emissions are substantially curtailed and global temperature rise meets the 2°C (3.6°F) limit agreed to in the Paris accord, no place in South Asia would exceed 95°F, though wet-bulb temperatures over 88°F would be widespread. Such temperatures can still be deadly, especially to already vulnerable populations like the elderly.[..] [1]https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change-tracker-the-rising-threat-of-humid-heatwaves-11597852162995.html https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change... [2]https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-vulnerable-21672 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-...

mschuster91 6y ago

> Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams. "Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy". The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
Are you sure you’re disagreeing with the parent poster? It sounds to me like you’ve just outlined a plan to achieve the same goal.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  The parent poster advocated for a one-child policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372090
Chris2048 6y ago
> "Population management" is a road leading You can say that about anything: socialist policies, "no-tolerance" policies, anything that looks like censorship. You say there have been many such example, then trot out Nazi Germany; The fact the Nazis purposefully initiated a genocide (the holocaust) out of hatred out the Jews undermines the suggestion that there was a genuine attempt at population management. Chinas also has a pretty poor human rights example, aside from it's 1-child policy. Do you have any example of a modern (first-world, developed) country with a good human-rights record, and QOL index pursuing population management?

jhowell 6y ago

> And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions that will further isolate the United States due to xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate. How long before "their" water born illnesses become our airborne viruses?

Chris2048 6y ago
> to reunite the "kingdom." BS. They just don't want to be part of a new "kingdom". Brexiteers don't trust EU politician, but they also don't trust UK politicians. > My money is on the Chinese Chinese aggression isn't much better than US "xenophobic thinking", plus India has pretty good contacts with Europe and other south-Asian countries. Plus there is a large and influential Indian population in the US, I'd be surprised in The Indian population in China are half as influential.
apatters 6y ago
This seems like a comment by someone who lacks a basic knowledge of Indian/Chinese relations but has an axe to grind against America. India and China are constantly saber rattling over turf wars and other geopolitical issues, and India withdrew from the recent Chinese-led RCEP free trade agreement over concerns that China would compromise their economic sovereignty. India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say, German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario where things change for the better and neither China nor America is involved whatsoever.
- bluGill 6y ago
  India has more than enough smart people to design and build everything they need. Labor is cheap there too, so they can dig in pipes everywhere cheaply. The things that need to be done are public knowledge or easy to find out. Most of the west already does it, and has been for one hundred years or so. There is nothing magical about turning bad water into clean drinkable water. All that India is lacking is the will (probably because of money or corruption - both real problems).

betwixthewires 6y ago

You talk about fixing water infrastructure like it is really hard (so hard you need the British to do it) and your alternative is to eliminate a significant potion of the population? You think that is easier? Not to even talk of the ethical concerns or the unintended consequences, just from a logistical standpoint, your statement is absurd. There is no way that is is easier to reduce a human population than it is to increase water availability. I don't usually attack people (and technically I'm only criticizing your statement, not attacking you directly) but when malthusians start talking I immediately know that they don't know what they're talking about. And on an ethical note, managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.

imtringued 6y ago
If you fix the problem today one day there will be 3 billion indians and you have to fix the problem again. It's much easier to reduce their reproduction rate through education and that education comes with other benefits.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  People don't just have kids en masse without a reason. People historically had lots of kids for 2 reasons: a lot of them died before reaching reproductive age, and they needed more hands to produce food because most people lived in a subsistence agriculture environment. The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in child mortality, that and development from agricultural to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in reducing the number of kids a woman has. Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then becomes to have less kids. You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the west during development into industrial economies and yet the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic pressures. A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate. At that rate population does not increase. Long story short, at least in cities (where the water shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility. So the shortages you see of water and other resources can be entirely attributed to inefficient resource allocation, and once capacity is increased to match population you won't have to worry about it again and again.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

>The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. india will run out of resources(and water) before population hits a peak. depopulation is a statistical guarantee. reducing population voluntarily is the only way to assure a reasonable stock of the gene pool before the country completely runs out of resources and scarcity escalates into wars of depopulation(historically, it has been proven that war always follows drought or famine on a larger scale..from genghis khan to african tribes to vikings to the last syrian war, if you can collect enough data sets about world famine/droughts/scarcities, wars always follow.) now..how to go about it. its a multi pronged approach: 1. stop incentivising children. what does this mean? instead of punitive measures or coercive one child policy, the state should incentivise responsible procreation and reward the child free. like an UBI for those who dont contribute to population growth. 2. provide free preservation of genetic material(sperm/eggs/dna) in a gene pool databank for posterity. this may not mean anything. it may amount to something. the idea that a 'legacy' might have a chance in a better world through frozen dna is a perk. it is a small cost and a nice gesture to reward selfless action for the nation. also: who knows what we might need in 300-500 years later. 3. go back to village or rural economies. by this, i dont mean that indians should start turning back time wrt sci and tech. what i mean is that people should go back village size communities. these have to be self governing and self sustaining units that can manage their own resources. 4. diversity is a double edged sword. i am not talking about social diversity, but diversity of resource expenditure and resource scarcity. there are too many people in india and to a certain extent, more cohesion and homogeneous living/way of life will give smaller communities more agency over how they manage local resources. example: a meat eating population has a different resource expenditure pattern than a vegetarian/dairy inclusive one. rural communities differ from urban community's needs. droughty areas have different management starategies than those with monsoons. 5. it's very easy wrt water. dig more ponds and save rain water. protect watersheds and prevent ag/industrial runoffs. adopt 'nile valley' model of digging canals. take whatever you grow indoors into hydroponic systems. india still gets a lot of rain during the monsoons. development of rural areas and relieving the pressure in urban density will help. but only if there is a limit on the number of people per resource budgeted zone. 6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted, the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep. they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2] [..]He and his colleagues previously looked at how heat waves would evolve with warming in the Middle East and found that region will likely be home to the highest wet-bulb temperatures the world will see. (Bandar Mahshahr in Iran hit a wet-bulb temperature of nearly 95°F during a 2015 heat wave, which translates to a heat index of about 163°F (73°C).) But South Asia poses the bigger concern in terms of threats to people, as it is home to one fifth of the world’s population and is an area of deep poverty. “That combination is what makes, what shapes this acute vulnerability,” Eltahir said. Eltahir and his colleagues found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95°F threshold by century’s end and most of South Asia will approach that threshold. If emissions are substantially curtailed and global temperature rise meets the 2°C (3.6°F) limit agreed to in the Paris accord, no place in South Asia would exceed 95°F, though wet-bulb temperatures over 88°F would be widespread. Such temperatures can still be deadly, especially to already vulnerable populations like the elderly.[..] [1]https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change-tracker-the-rising-threat-of-humid-heatwaves-11597852162995.html https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change... [2]https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-vulnerable-21672 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-...