Comparison of population of U.S. states with administrative areas in India

Dhruva Jaishankar, Director of the US Initiative at ORF (son of S Jaishankar, Padma Shri, former Indian diplomat and the current Minister of External Affairs and grandson of K Subrahmanyam, the doyen of India's strategic affairs community) posted a tweet comparing U.S. states to administrative areas in India with similar populations.

It has generated a lot of interest mainly among fellow Indians & evoked insightful & funny reactions -

In terms of population, New York State has been compared with Mumbai metro region while California is similar to Orissa.

"California (CA) by itself is the 6th largest economy in the world. So, on one hand you see the absurdity of this comparison but on the other hand you can see the potential of India, if people get their act together."

"Odisha and Assam never seem to matter"

"Odisha matters only when people need coal and iron ores"

"Population of India is approximately equivalent to the population of the entire continent of Africa, which is eleven times bigger!"

About 65% of the Indian population resides in rural areas.

"Always wondered why so many US states are like literally rectangles with maybe one or two rough edges here and there.... It's like they were cutting a cake for 50 kids....."

"because when they reached from Europe they thought they had blank slate to draw shape"

"There are no geographical features to act as boundaries in some areas... Many of the non-straight line state borders are rivers."

" many U.S. territories in the were portioned out based on lat and lon parallels(like most of the Northern Border). Eastern and Southern U.S. has boundaries primarily defined by rivers."

"the borders were first drawn on map and later on Ground"

Some tweeple asked for a comparison with Australian states and territories and UK -