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Comment by rrrazdan | Hacker News Reader

No one is confused about the death of the river. The problem is clearly with Indian people itself, including me.

There is a lot going on at the ground level and there is a lot more that should be done.

I used to be as exasperated as you, but I have come to peace that this is all attributable to poverty. You cannot expect "rational" behaviour from people fighting for their next meal? As average incomes grow, people are going to care about other things and you can already see the shoots of this in India.

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>> I used to be as exasperated as you, but I have come to peace that this is all attributable to poverty.

I think it's all due to overpopulation - which it can be argued is a result of poverty too. As long as the world refuses to address exponential population growth, we will continue to run into resource shortages on this finite planet.

Yes, it is over-population. 100 years ago, india had 200 million population, it felt like it had virtually infinite resources. So, abuse of natural resources, were not felt. But the same abuses are felt by everyone, when the population is 1.2B. The habits of poeple needs to be adjusted when the population is 5x compared ~100 years ago.

The population of India has an average IQ of 81. Compare that with China, which has an average IQ of 100. I guess this is why China instituted the (very smart) one-child-per-family policy whereas India has done nothing.

http://www.rlynn.co.uk/uploads/pdfs/Intelligence%20and%20the...

Well IQ is directly related to nutrition. So lets see how that plays out.

Also Indian population density is less than the Netherlands. So its not all about over population.

India is also inching towards lower birth rates with southern states already below 2.1 .

I have got news for you. The exponential population growth is already slowing in most of the world save Africa. It is going to halt somewhere around 2150 and then reverse.

>>You cannot expect "rational" behaviour from people fighting for their next meal?

I completely refuse to believe this. Poor are no way to blame here.

Its pretty much the upper middle class, rich and industrial waste that is polluting the rivers.

In a city like Bangalore, most of the lakes have been destroyed to the point of no recovery. What were once places of recreation are now cesspool for all sorts of waste from high rising Apartment complexes.

Could not upvote this enough !

It is not ALL attributable to poverty - There is no SINGLE factor (aside from Education). The poor are not the only ones using the river as a burial ground. do you understand what a single rotting body does to the water supply, let alone tens of thousands?

I also presume that the volume of bodies has increased in line with population, whilst the river volume has stayed constant (if not, in fact, decreased)

I'm going to make a modest proposal, but I wonder if there's enough caloric content in a body to make it worthwhile as feedstock in industrial aquaculture.

Nutrients preserved, value created, payments potentially made to the bereaved families. Everyone's a winner!

Hindus don't bury their dead. They cremate them. Now there are polluting aspects to cremation but it can be done better than burial using proper incineration equipment. I have observed that such environmentally friendly cremation services are becoming more common in India even in smaller cities.

Not all Hindus cremate their dead. In fact a small minority do. In South India, burials are what you will see in nearly all the cases.

Only a certain castes cremate. Everybody else buries and yes river burial too is not common.

Lets talk of reckless dumping of human waste, industrial waste into rivers and lakes.

Do yo have any citations that only a small minority of Hindus cremate their dead?

As a non-religious athiest hindu this is the first time I am hearing this, could you give some pointers. I would have expected it to go the other way (if at all), that is, only a small minority of hindu's do not cremate their dead.

In South India, we very rarely cremate.

Every village has a big "Rudrabhoomi". Cremation is a very upper caste thing.

India is the richest country in the world. You don't grow to 1.3 billion people because your hungry and poor or don't have resources.

How could a people even breed themselves to 1.3 billion with the lack of resources?

These stories are someones fabrication. There is plenty of water in India or their population wouldn't be growing.

"India is the richest country in the world."

Using what measure? Using total GDP it seems to be 8th or 9th (behind, for example, Italy) and per capita it is pretty low 120th or worse.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-wo...

I'm not sure how true this. India is only place where jews were never persecuted. jews, ahmadis, zorastrians lived peacefully in india, when they were persecuted everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism#In_South_Asia

You need to adjust for the currency. Rupee is artificially lowered to boost exports. Italy has 58M people. India has 1.25B people. This is approximately 25 times. So, India needs at-least 25x food, cloths, housing etc. If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, it would result in india being much bigger economy than Italy.

But doesn't that imply that comparing national GDPs is silly then - because presumably you could make that kind of argument about any country?

India is richer than Italy because it has 25 times more people/food? That's absolute nonsense.

If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, this is what you get: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

That's interesting - so if you ignore the EU as not really being a country the #1 is China.

Yes, in aggregate the PPP GDP of China is #1, just slightly ahead of the United States, both of which are just below the European Union (which, to be fair, is like the US but with each state having more sovereignty in the federal system).

The picture is complicated by the relative populations though. Per capita, the EU is $25k, China is $13k, US is $54k, Germany is $46k, and India is only $6k. Unfortunately, the PPP calculation is very complicated and controversial so I don't really know how valid or useful these numbers are. Unless we're going for a trivial definition, it also doesn't say much about availability of luxuries, infrastructure, stability of government/economy, etc. so it's not a 1:1 mapping of wealth.

1+ billion poor people means wealth in aggregate, but each of those poor people are going to be making very short term choices.

EX: Corruption is a great exmaple of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

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