Why Most Indians Live Above This Line

for hundreds if not thousands of years India has remained the world's second most populous country behind China but in a matter of only a few more months that historical reality will change Forever at some point in 2023 the Indian population will finally overtake the Chinese with more than 1.4 billion people and from then on throughout the rest of the 21st century and beyond India will likely continue to remain the new world's most populous nation and it has been a long time coming as recently as 70 years ago back in 1950 China's population of 552 million was still significantly larger than India's 359 million but over the seven plus Decades of history that have followed since then India's population grew by a whopping 390 percent while China's only grew by 255 percent and while China's population is beginning to stagnate and decrease India's is still growing by the midpoint of the century in 2050 the United Nations projects that China will lose around 30 million people from their population day while India will add another 200 million more nearly an entire Brazil's worth of additional people in less than 30 years but the massive explosion in India's population over the past several decades has not been even across the whole country and India's continued growth across the 21st century will not be even either in fact the majority of the states within India already have fertility rates the amount of children born per woman that are lower than the natural population replacement level of 2.1 this means that the birth rate across most of India is actually already more comparable to countries in the west and elsewhere who are experiencing natural population decline like Japan Germany and the United Kingdom the only states in India that are still growing their populations and the states that will add the vast majority of those additional 200 million Indians by 2050 are all up in the north of the country in these states Bihar meghalaya udar Pradesh jharkhand and Manipur and perhaps unsurprisingly these are the same general areas that have been leading the majority of India's population growth now for decades if you draw a line across India up here in the north you will discover a startling population imbalance within the country nearly half of India's population of about 1.4 billion people live to the north of this line across just a relative sliver of the country's total area while the other half of course lived beneath it across the majority of India's land mass this line of population distribution within India can come as a shock to many Americans and people in the west who are unfamiliar with India because the majority of India's largest mega cities than most westerners have heard of are actually beneath this line in the south of the top five largest cities in India four of them are beneath this line and of the top ten seven of them are beneath it including the largest and most densely populated city in India of all Mumbai the sheer scale of mumbai's population is difficult for a lot of people to understand so let me try and put it this way Mumbai is a coastal city and located across an island called southcent this island is only 619 square kilometers in size which is smaller than Singapore and yet it is home to more than 20 million people which is greater than the entire population of Kazakhstan the world's ninth biggest country to put it another way all of the boroughs of New York City combined Manhattan Brooklyn Queens Staten Island and the Bronx add up to 784 square kilometers which is 42 more land than South said Island where Mumbai is located and yet New York City's population is less than eight and a half million people South said Island therefore has about the same population density as Manhattan but across an area that is 10 times the size of Manhattan including this place called duravi this location within Mumbai is considered to be one of the largest slums in the world and not because of its area the whole place is only about two square kilometers in size or about three-fifths of Central Park in the middle of Manhattan and yet there were about 1 million people who live crowded within here making it one of the most densely populated places anywhere on the planet and yet insanely crowded to Ravi within Mumbai on Southside island is still south of the population line within the area where the minority of Indians overall live this fact makes more sense though when you look at India through the lens of population density where you can now clearly see the nearly unbroken chain of continuous clusters of people across the north of India above the line and only scattered clusters of high population urban areas across the area south of the line including most of India's big mega cities like Mumbai Bangalore and Hyderabad but why is India's population pattern shaped this way with a massive amount of people living within the interior of the country up in the north and relatively fewer people living around the coasts and in the South a very big part of the explanation is simply the Indian subcontinent's geography and its influence on weather patterns and we'll begin here by swapping out the population density map for a topographic map one of the biggest keys to the puzzle are simply the enormous Arc of mountains to the north of the subcontinent the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush these mountains are the tallest and the most formidable in the world and are among the youngest mountains as well they were formed millions of years ago when the Indian tectonic plate first crashed into the Eurasian plate a geologic process that is still ongoing just as it has for tens of millions of years now the Indian plate is still crashing northwards into the Eurasian Plate at a pace of around 67 millimeters a year which is contributing to the already towering mountains of the Himalayas growing even higher Mount Everest already the highest mountain in the world is continuing to grow even higher at a pace of around four millimeters a year because of this ongoing process in total there are more than a hundred different mountain peaks across the Himalayas that soared more than 7 200 meters above sea level and they all serve to create the most significant barrier across land anywhere on the planet most significantly for India these Towery mountains basically act like a wall and they block nearly all of the frigid and dry polar winds that blow down from the north from Siberia across Central Asia as a result the land to the north of the mountains in Tibet is effectively a high dry and cold desert because there's nothing nothing to stop all those wins until they hit the wall of the mountains and because of these mountains they cause the opposite climatic effects over to the south in India without any of the cold and dry winds blowing in from Central Asia Northern India is kept significantly warmer and wetter than it otherwise would be and consequently the temperate zone extending across Northern India is significantly warmer than any other temperate zone on the planet especially during the winter months which means that the growing season for plants here is effectively year-round and longer than pretty much anywhere else but then the other big thing that the Towering Himalayas do for Northern India and its population potential is significantly affect the area's monsoon winds and levels of precipitation during the summer months moist air evaporated from the Indian Ocean will be pushed into the subcontinent and when that moist air reaches the mountains it will rise and cool but fail to climb high enough to reach over the mountains in a Tibet which is another reason why Tibet is so dry and arid then that cool and moist air will have nowhere left to go but back down from the mountain slopes and across the open Plains of Northern India and Bangladesh which often means that the summer months between June and September will see an absolutely ungodly amount of rainfall here in an annual process known as the southwestern Monsoon but the vast plains of Northern India don't get most of their water from rainfall instead they get most of it from the rivers that also come down from the Towering mountains up in the north you see the mountains here store the third largest concentration of freshwater ice and snow in the world remaining only behind Antarctica in the Arctic Circle as a result the Himalayas alone contain an estimated 15 000 separate glaciers that collectively store somewhere around 12 000 cubic kilometers worth of fresh water roughly equivalent to the entire volume of water found in Lake Superior within North America so as a result of their height and their enormous volumes of water three of the world's Mightiest Rivers all begin up here and they all flow to the South through the plains of Northern India Pakistan and Bangladesh the Indus engines and the brahmaputra rivers and these rivers are what Grant the wide open Plains of the northern subcontinent of their name the indo-ging plain a stretch of nearly continuous flat arable Farmland that is larger than the entirety of France and the second largest piece of contiguous arable land anywhere in the world only behind the great Mississippi Basin in the United States and best of all the Indus Ganges and brahmaputra rivers and all of the tributaries that flow through this huge plain are all fed by the glaciers up in the Himalayas which means that they maintain a continuous flow of water all throughout the year and they aren't heavily dependent upon the erratic Winds of the weather that brings the rain and even better the glacial melt into these rivers from the mountains blesses the rivers with an abundance of Rich minerals and nutrients which means that whenever the rivers overflow into the Region's floodplains they distribute those nutrients into the soil and effectively function as a form of rich and Powerful natural fertilizer laser in short a perfect combination of factors that creates the richest and the most highly fertile piece of Farmland anywhere in the world that can grow a massive amount of food all throughout the year to support a lot of people it's no surprise then that when you compare a map of India's population density with a map of India's elevation with a further map of India's agricultural productivity you'll see that most of the Agricultural productivity is up in the population Bell to people across the flat Plains of the north while much of the Indian interior to the south of the line is simply a lot less agriculturally productive and consequently has a lower population density it's also a small Wonder then how the northern Indian state of udhar Pradesh alone became home to more than 240 million people today greater than the entire population of Pakistan or Brazil and all in an area that's no larger than the United Kingdom conversely the southern portions of India beneath the population line don't have this same scale of advantages towards Agriculture and population growth that's seen in the north much of the area beneath the lion is is dominated by a large geographic feature known as the Deccan Plateau a largely arid Rocky and hilly expanse of land with an average elevation of about 600 meters and while the Himalayan Mountain Range greatly improves the North's ability to grow food another mountain range down here across the South and the West inhibits this Region's ability to do the same the Western Goths here that extend across the westernmost Fringe of the country while they may not be as dominating as the Himalayas the Western gods are still a significant mountain range nonetheless with many of their peaks over 2 000 meters in height which are higher than the biggest mountain range found in Australia that separates that continent's narrow and wet Eastern coastal plain from the dry Outback desert of the interior and in a similar fashion to those mountains in Australia the Western Gods here in India generally cause the same kind of effect over the Deccan Plateau of the Indian interior there's only a narrow coastal plain between them in the East and the Arabian Sea in the west where winds blowing in from the ocean are actually capable of causing their rainfall but once those moist winds strike the Western gods they fail to climb over them and sow the lands to their east across the Deccan Plateau are drier and more arid than they otherwise would be were the mountains not to exist this is why when you look at a precipitation map of India you can clearly see the effect that the Western gods have with abundant rainfall across the narrow strip of a coastal plain in the west and significantly less rainfall immediately Beyond them in the interior where the Deccan Plateau is and then to complement the continuous Western got mountains there is a similar mountain range across the east of India as well the Eastern Gods these aren't continuous and they're a little smaller than the mountains across Western India so they don't block as much moisture coming in from the Bay of Bengal but they do serve to block some of it so the vast expanse of the Deccan Plateau in the interior is less flat and receives less rainfall than the plains of the north which of course makes agriculture a more difficult practice here but then there is the further disadvantage that the rivers across the south of India here are not fed by glaciers like they are in the north and instead they're fed by rainfall the biggest Three Rivers here to consider are the godavari Krishna and kaveri all three of which begin within the Western Gods mountain range and flow eastwards across the Deccan Plateau before emptying into the Bay of Bengal but of course the Western gods are nowhere near as high as the Himalayas are and they're located a lot further south where there aren't any cold winds blowing in from Siberia so they don't have any glaciers and that means that all of the rivers here are entirely fed by the rainfall blowing in from the Arabian Sea but that means that they aren't as suitable for agriculture as the glacial fed Rivers up in the north like the Ganges and the brahmaputra for two critical reasons one they don't get the same kinds of minerals and nutrients as the glacial fed Rivers do which means that when they flood they don't deposit the same levels of nutrients into the soil and two their water volumes are left to the mercy of the weather so when it doesn't rain for a while the rivers have less water in them and there's less water are available for things like irrigation that's necessary for agriculture while conversely the rivers up in the north almost always have a lot of water in them for irrigation because they're fed by the world's third largest system of glaciers that aren't dependent on the erratic Winds of the weather while there are locations of high agricultural productivity in the south of India they're more limited in area and Scattered apart from each other in stark contrast to the huge continuous piece of Farmland across the north of India and thus this is why you also have smaller and more scattered concentrations of high population density across the southern section of India beneath the line in places like Mumbai Hyderabad and Bangalore but not large stretches of continuously high density like you see in the north but it's not like the population of India beneath this line is low there's still more than 700 million people who live there which is about the entire population of Europe it's still pretty densely populated at about the same scale as Germany all throughout it it's just that the overall density to the north above the Lion in places like udar Pradesh and Bihar is just absolutely insane and the most crowded stretch of land anywhere in the world and with what's arguably the most productive piece of Farmland anywhere in the world it's really no wonder why now if you're anything like me you're probably intensely curious about why our world works the way 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so much for watching [Music]

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 3,213,413

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: GM-OI7HcCeU

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022