Where Did All These People Come From?

Everybody knows India and China are the world's most populous countries (little known fact - the US is a distant #3), but you don't really appreciate it until you visit and see how many people are packed into such a small space. What you don't realize is that India is only about 1/3 the size of the US in terms of land area. Couple that with a population four times as large, and you get an average population density of over 1,000 people per square mile, while the US average is about 86 and China's is 363.

That means people are on top of each other, everywhere (in the first picture below, you can see the smoke from the explosion that's still burning). I literally do not understand how the country is able to get that much food to that many people in such a confined space every day. Where does it all come from? I guess that's part of the problem.

Wherever you go, people (and cows and camels) are living in every inch of available space. As we were leaving a meeting today, I saw this group of people hanging out in an empty lot across the street.

I realized they were all living there. Inside the little hut - which is an abandoned milk stand - there were about three little kids laying down, taking up what looked like about half of all the available space. (The most striking thing was how happy some of the kids seemed... they were playing, running around with big smiles, despite the fact that their mom was busy stoking a garbage fire to cook their dinner... my theory on their happiness will have to wait for its own blog post.)

One of our Indian colleagues was talking about how improving the nutrition situation will help reduce the size of families. Perplexed, I asked why. She went on to explain that families had to play the odds here - they will have five or six kids, hoping at least one or two will survive to adulthood.