alt Hacker News> 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?
> 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.