India Country Profile

1. General information

Facts

• Population: 1,080,264,388 (est. 2005)

• Area: 3,287,590 sq km

• Location: Southern Asia. Neighbours are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China, Nepal and Pakistan. It Borders the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

• Capital: New Delhi

• Government type: Federal republic. President: A.P.J. Abdul KALAM

• Currency: Indian Rupee = 100 Paise

• Language: Hindi is the national language (30% of the population). There are 14 other official languages: Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Sanskrit and Hindustani. English is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication.

• Religions: Hindu 80.5%, Muslim 13.4%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.9%, other 1.8%, unspecified 0.1%.

• Ethnic groups: Indo-Aryan 72%, Dravidian 25%, Mongoloid and other 3%.

• Climate: Temperate in north and tropical monsoon in south.

• Terrain: In south upland plain (Deccan Plateau), in west deserts, Himalayas in north and flat land along the Ganges.

• Natural Hazards: Flooding, droughts, earthquakes and severe thunderstorms.

Population

India is one of the most populated countries in the world. In the year 2001 India became the second country in the world after China to cross the one billion mark. About 1,080,264,388 people live today in India. By the middle of the 21st century, India will have passed China in the terms of number of inhabitants. India’s population grew by 21.34 % between 1991 and 2000. If the growth continues in the same way, space might be a problem.

Although India occupies only 2.4% of the world’s land area, it supports over 15% of the world’s population. 63.5% of the population are the age of 14-65. The population is growing with an annual speed of 1.44%. About 70% of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 200 towns and cities.

The birth rate of India is 22.8 births /1000. The life expectancy of an individual is 64.35 years. The total fertility rate is 2.85 children born per woman. About 40 % of the population in India are poor. Only about 59.5 % of the population can read and write (Male literacy 70.2% and female literacy 48.3%). The percentage of doctors per 1000 is very low, only about 0.07 %.

Inhabitants in the biggest cities:

City: Million people:

Bombay: 19.4

Calcutta: 15.4

Delhi: 19.0

Bangalore: 4.2

Total 58.0

(“Using CIA World Fact book,” 2005)

2. Historical development

The classical Indian culture was created when the Aryan tribes invaded from the northwest 1500 B.C and merged together with the Indus Valley civilization, which is one of the oldest in the world. The Arabs came in the 8th, Turkish in the 12th and the European traders came in the late 15th century to India. In the 19th century Britain took political control of all Indian lands. There was a little resistance against British colonialism and because of Mohandas Gandhi’s and Jawaharlar Nehru’s non-violence philosophy India became independent in 1947. The continent was divided into a non-religious state and a smaller Muslim state of Pakistan. A war between these two countries led to that East Pakistan became a separate nation of Bangladesh in 1971. There have been ongoing disputes in India about Pakistan over Kashmir, where environmental degradation, overpopulation, poverty and ethnic and religious disagreement occur. This still occurs even though there have been impressive gains in economic investment and output. (“Using NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository,” 2004)

3. Political Structure

India is a democratic republic with a parliamentary system of government with subdivisions in each state. All 26 states are individually governed. There are multiple parties: Congress socialist, Indian socialist, Janata socialist, Conservative swatrana (freedom) party and the Muslim