India Facts

Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi with Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten and his wife in 1947 India has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra Modi was elected for a third term as India’s prime minister in June 2024.

Most members are elected indirectly by the legislatures of state and union territories. The legislature of India is called the Parliament (संसद Sansad). All three parts are in New Delhi, the capital city of India. That means a strong federal government with weak state governments. Its original form said that India would be a “sovereign, democratic republic”. India is ruled under the Constitution of India.

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The Congress is considered the ideological centre in Indian political culture; the BJP is right-wing. India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; its eighty-nine wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention. In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially. The pervasive and ecologically devastating human encroachment of recent decades has critically endangered Indian wildlife. Critically endangered species include the gharial, a crocodilian; the great Indian bustard; and the Indian white-rumped vulture, which has become nearly extinct by having ingested the carrion of diclofenac-treated cattle.

Its government is a constitutional republic that represents a highly diverse population consisting of thousands of ethnic groups and hundreds of languages. The island country of Sri Lanka is situated some 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast coast of India. India also has the largest population of people adhering to both Zoroastrianism (Parsis and Iranis) and the Bahá’í Faith. The Eighth Schedule of India’s Constitution also recognises 22 languages, including Hindi but not English, which the government is obligated to develop. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India’s economic expansion, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture. Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission; Southeast Asians took the initiative as well, with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages.

• Averaging an economic growth rate of 7.5% for several years before 2007, India has more than doubled its hourly wage rates during the first decade of the 21st century.
• Their sponsorship and promotion, however, has continued in secular, modern India.aa India also has local and modern dance traditions.
• India’s nominal GDP per capita increased steadily from US$308 in 1991, when economic liberalisation began, to US$1,380 in 2010, to an estimated US$2,731 in 2024.
• Indian history begins with the birth of the Indus Valley Civilization and the coming of the Aryans.
• Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company turned India into a colonial economy but consolidated its sovereignty.
• A teacher and former governor of Jharkhand State, she is the first person from a tribal community to serve as India’s head of state.

Almost all surviving ancient Indian art thereafter is in various forms of religious sculpture in durable materials, or coins. A very large majority of Indians have their marriages arranged by their parents or family elders. Multi-generational patrilineal joint families have been the norm in India, though nuclear families are becoming common in urban areas. The Constituent Assembly of India abolished untouchability in 1947, the Republic of India did more formally in 1950, and India has since enacted other anti-discriminatory laws and social welfare initiatives related to caste. India bears a disproportionately large burden of the world’s tuberculosis rates, with World Health Organization (WHO) statistics for 2022 estimating 2.8 million new infections annually, accounting for 26% of the global total. In India’s higher education system, a significant number of seats are reserved under affirmative action policies for the historically disadvantaged.

As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence. But in the South, under the Pallava and Chola dynasties, sculpture in both stone and bronze had a sustained period of great achievement; the large bronzes with Shiva as Nataraja have become an iconic symbol of India. Over the following centuries a distinctly Indian style of sculpting the human figure developed, with less interest in articulating precise anatomy than ancient Greek sculpture but showing smoothly flowing forms expressing prana (“breath” or life-force).

Hindi became the official language (and a number of other local languages achieved official status), while a vibrant English-language intelligentsia thrived. Many British institutions stayed in place (such as the parliamentary system of government); English continued to be a widely used lingua franca; and India remained within the Commonwealth. Direct administration by the British, which began in 1858, effected a political and economic unification of the subcontinent. Eventually, some of those raiders stayed; by the 13th century much of the subcontinent was under Muslim rule, and the number of Muslims steadily increased. Other religions, notably Buddhism and Jainism, originated in India—though their presence there is now quite small—and throughout the centuries residents of the subcontinent developed a rich intellectual life in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, architecture, literature, music, and the fine arts.

The Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan for over six decades. During the election, critics accused Mr Modi and his party of using hate speech, attacking the country’s Muslim minority, and jailing opposition figures. The election saw a resurgence of India’s opposition, which won 234 seats. A teacher and former governor of Jharkhand State, she is the first person from a tribal community to serve as India’s head of state. But it is also tackling huge, social, economic and environmental problems.

It is a multilingual (multiple languages) and multicultural (multiple cultures) society. By 1200 BCE, Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, spread to India from the northwest. The Indian subcontinent is the second most diverse region after Africa. Humans came to the Indian subcontinent from Africa more than 55,000 years ago. It has been the world’s largest democracy by number of people since 1947.

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They can make any government action invalid if it contradicts the Constitution. The Chief Justice of India is the head of the Supreme Court. They are elected directly by the people’s vote.

Indian pilots associations and Sabharwal’s family have criticised what they see as an attempt to pin the blame; and have called for more scrutiny on the aircraft maker, the airline and other factors too. The news report said the Indian investigators are preparing to state in their final probe report that Air India Flight 171 crashed because one of the pilots turned off the aircraft’s fuel switches in an act that was “almost certainly” intentional. It came days after Trump wished PM Modi on his birthday on September 17, as India-US ties slowly came back on track. Trump, being Trump, boasted even though India denied any such concrete assurance. The eccentric US President made the remarks on October 15, 2025, as he lavished praise on PM Modi after he claimed that India assured the US on halting oil purchases from Russia.

Hindi and English are official languages of India. In the west is the Arabian Sea, in the south is the Indian Ocean, and in the east is the Bay of Bengal. One of the oldest languages in the world, Tamil, developed in South India more than 3000 years ago. It is used in different Indian languages in different forms.

The number of people living in urban areas grew by 31.2% between 1991 and 2001. Migration from rural to urban areas has been an important dynamic in India’s recent history. Despite a government ban on sex-selective foeticide, the practice has far from stopped. The under-five mortality rate for the country was 113 per 1,000 live births in 1994 whereas in 2018 it reduced to 41.1 per 1,000 live births. The first post-colonial census, conducted in 1951, counted 361 million people. Increasing access to electricity and clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas have been priorities for energy in India.

India’s foreign exchange remittances of US$100 billion in 2022, highest in the world, were contributed to its economy by 32 million Indians working in foreign countries. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 forced the nation to liberalise its economy; since then, it has moved increasingly towards a free-market system by emphasising both foreign trade and direct investment BET 365 inflows. The vast majority of Indians fall into the global low-income group based on average daily income. With an average annual GDP growth rate of 5.8% over the past two decades, and reaching 6.1% during 2011–2012, India is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. In 2008, a civilian nuclear agreement was signed between India and the United States. India maintains a “no first use” nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its “Minimum Credible Deterrence” doctrine.

Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;k China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. The deleted map also depicted Aksai Chin, a territory located in northeastern Ladakh, as part of India. After a period marked by trade disputes, the two countries have recently agreed to reduce tariffs, shifting from a 50 per cent rate imposed by the US on Indian goods to 18 per cent, the lowest among Asian nations. The map, showing PoK and Aksai Chin as an integral part of India, was posted last week while announcing Washington DC’s trade deal with New Delhi.