South Asia is a basket with a regionful of problems, or a region with a basketful of problems, whatever. But the triumph of and challenge for our land is in the way in which we deal with human output of the most material kind. I mean excreta. Gunk.
Just as we are what we eat, we are also (slightly circularly) what we digest. It is the spreading of wastes into the fields and terraces that has so added to the agricultural fertility of the vast and fruitful plains of the Indus and Ganga. In these tropics, the sunshine and humidity help bacteria to grow. Decay is the order of the day, which leads to plant productivity. Organic breakdown adds to the humus, already rich with Himalayan silt and plant detritus.
Agricultural fertility delivers human fertility. High density of population leads to urban civilisations that in turn serve up high culture, flowering of the arts, and great architecture. The finest cities of our pre-colonial collective past – Lahore, Lucknow, Delhi, Kathmandu – derived their grandeur from the fertility of the next door fields.
Talking of density of population, you now know why South Asia houses a sixth of all humanity, at last count. Over millennia, human wastes got spread out in a thin layer over the land. China outstripped us to become more populous simply because the Chinese are more systematic in distributing the substance to the fields. Night soil transport has social sanction, whereas we prefer to leave it to gravity to transfer the slurry unto the potato patch.