If All Indians Lived As Densely Packed As Mumbai, Our Entire Population Would Fit In Haryana

As of February this year, we had about 7.71 billion people walking the Earth, and this number continues to grow everyday.

The thing is these people aren't distributed evenly. And as Mumbaikars can testify, our city has a disproportionately large number of people here.

Reuters

Data analyst Chetan Sharma, who goes by the handle dashanan on Reddit, crunched the numbers on this. He posted an infographic to the r/dataisbeautiful subreddit, where he pondered what the world would look like if everyone was as densely packed as we are in Mumbai. And his conclusions are frankly dumbfounding.

Apparently, if all of India's estimated 1.37 billion people were packed as tightly as the folks in Mumbai, all of us would be able to fit in Haryana.

To clarify, that's all of India packed into a 44,212 square kilometre area, while still setting aside 3,201 square kilometres for an extra national park. When you look at that, it's a wonder Mumbai can even hold as many people as it does.

And let me say, the math on this checks out. According to the World Population Review, Mumbai has an officially recorded population of about 12.5 million as of a 2011 census, but that number goes up to about 18.4 million when looking at its wider metropolitan area. That's a population density of about 30,000 people per square kilometre. Which, when trying to apply to all of India's population at that density, gives us a "required" area slightly less than the confines of Haryana.

dashanan/Reddit

He doesn't stop there either, but does the math on how much space it would take to fit all of the people in the world. Apparently, a single country could fit all of us. Not China, not India. Not even a comparatively smaller country like Germany. No, apparently Romania would suffice.

Yeah, he's saying that 7.6 million people would fit in Romania's 238,391 square kilometres, again leaving space for an approximately 7,000 square kilometre-large natural preserve.

If those numbers don't boggle you're brain, you're not thinking about it hard enough. Basically, if he house everyone in the world as densely as we do here in Mumbai, we could leave 99.95 percent of the Earth's area free.

dashanan/Reddit

Of course, most of those people would then be living in inhumane conditions, and the rest of us wouldn't have it much better. Can you imagine trying to provide running water for so many people in such a small area? Or dealing with all their garbage and sewage output? WHAT KIND OF BANDWIDTH WOULD YOU EVEN GET?

Either way, maybe it's a reason to respect Mumbaikars and their ability to cohabitate in homes as large as a single room in many other places.