India

India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, since the mid-20th century. Its land is megadots, with 4% of its area covered by forest.

About India in brief

Summary India India is the second-most populous country, the seventh-largest country by land area. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. Its population grew from 361 million in 1951 to 1. 211 billion in 2011. India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, since the mid-20th century. It faces gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. Its land is megadots, with 4% of its area covered by forest, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in India’s culture, among these forests, in India and elsewhere in the world. The name India is derived from the ancient Persian word Hindush, an eastern province of the Greek Hellenistic state of Hellenism. It means ‘the land of the gods’ or ‘the place where the gods live’ in Hindi. The word ‘India’ is also used to refer to the Indian subcontinent, and the Indian Ocean region, as well as the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. India has been a secular federal republic since 1950, governed in a democratic parliamentary system. The country is a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class. It also has a space programme which includes several planned or completed extraterrestrial missions, including several planned missions to Mars, Venus, Jupiter and the moon. The Indian Ocean is second only to Africa in human genetic diversity, with a population of 1.2 billion people.

It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. The region is also in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and its Andaman & Nicobar islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia. Modern humans arrived on the Indian Subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only in genetic diversity. Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin. In the early medieval era, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism put down roots on India’s southern and western coasts. The Mughal Empire, in 1526, ushered in two centuries of relative peace,leaving a legacy of luminous architecture. The British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and ideas of education, modernity and the public life took root. In 1947 the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions, a Hindu-majority Dominion of India and a Muslim-majority dominion of Pakistan, amid large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration.