Partly because of how out of touch with reality they are.
In my grandparent’s days, several branches of a family lived under the same roof, and slept adjacent to each other on mattresses across the floor, and with a single set of power, fuel, lighting, and water to support just one small household. Obviously, these compromises existed, because people were less well off, and traded off minor luxuries for other conveniences.
Nowadays, all their descendants (and most of the rising generation of Indians afterwards) can afford to live in households with fewer numbers of people and far more power, fuel, lighting, and water for them, and can drive far and wide to their workplace in a short amount of time, and can even eat at restaurants on a regular basis while watching a movie at the cinema every weekend or so.
Despite this change, educated Indians have the nerve to complain about overpopulation. Because of what they have been taught in their high school civics class, they will complain about how their standard of living is hurt by too many people having children. Forget the illogicality of zero-sum thinking - it takes enormous selfishness and greed to not appreciate the leisurely life they have, and to feel that their leisure is a fundamental right threatened by families daring to have long-term ambitions that their own parents did.
It’s a ridiculous tautology. If overpopulation is defined as the ratio of people to the resources they have available, then obviously, any undivided family with limited resources is overpopulated. They were poor, not because they lived under one house. They lived under one house, because they were poor.
Much of India is greatly divided into concentrated cities and rural villages. There aren’t many suburbs. That’s because people can’t afford cars that would thus allow them to move to suburbs. It is thus so easy for anybody to point to a picture of crowded people in a bus and complain about how India is overpopulated. But Indians are not the worst here.
It makes my blood boil even further when I see foreigners online talking about how India needs a depopulation strategy to ensure the western world’s standard of living is not hurt. Progressives need to live up to their own principles and begin by killing themselves.