India vs Pakistan

India is 4.1 times larger than Pakistan — 3,287,263 against 796,095 km². India is 5.7 times more populous than Pakistan — 1,463,865,525 against 255,219,554 people.

Side by side

Population density

India is 1.4 times more densely populated than Pakistan — 445 against 321 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• Different currencies: the Indian rupee and the Pakistani rupee.

India

The most populous country in the world since 2023. The Ganges-Brahmaputra system drains the southern Himalaya into the largest delta on Earth, and Mawsynram and Cherrapunji in Meghalaya are the wettest inhabited places on record, with roughly 11 m of rain a year. Mumbai is the largest individual municipality; the Delhi urban agglomeration, which contains the capital, is larger still at around 33 million.

Pakistan

Five of the world's fourteen 8,000 m peaks stand in northern Pakistan, including K2 at 8,611 m. Outside the polar regions, this is the most heavily glaciated place on Earth: the Karakoram holds several glaciers over 50 km long, among them Siachen and Baltoro. The Indus runs about 3,200 km from Tibet to the Arabian Sea.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.