That's because of idiotic zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build multi family properties, high density residential, limit the height of skyscrapers and basically forced the entire nation to be a damn suburban hell hole, not because of a land shortage. India hopefully won't make the same idiotic mistakes the NIMBY soccer mom boomers did.

I don't know what western country you live in, but I'm guessing you have a very different definition of poverty than the UN. The UN has a list of criteria such as:

- Lacking access to electricity

- Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk

- Lacking access to sanitation facilities

- No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling

- Any child in the household has stunted growth due to malnutrition

You need at least a third of the criteria to be true in order for a household to be considered in poverty.

During my childhood I fulfilled the first three for about four years or so and knew many others in similar situations. This was in the US, any country with significant undeveloped land is going to have areas that have people who fulfill the first three pretty easily.

Just out of curiosity, how far did you have to walk to get potable water, how long did it take, what was the source, and how much did you carry back at a time? Sorry for so many questions, but this is very interesting to me.

Every year I lived in a different location but the shortest was a bit more than half an hour trip by bike and I could only safely manage a single gallon. Usually though we'd get water when we hitchhiked into town as we could get more at once. Both of these sources came from water resupply points for trucks but no on cared if you filled a few gallon containers. Rain water was also usable in many cases but we avoided drinking it. We went out maybe once a week or so?

I’m not calling you a liar, but I am heavily skeptical. Where and when did this occur within the continental United States?

I never said continental, this was on the Big Island in Hawaii. Though I would be shocked if there weren't similar places in the large patches of undeveloped land in the west side of the US.

There are two types of poverty being talked about here.

In the United States (where it is not only possible, but common for two people with education to lift a family out of poverty into the middle class), most people below the poverty have a drastically superior standard of living to anyone below the poverty line in India. The type of "poor" where two people are working full time jobs in the US would not be considered poor in India.