According to UN estimates, India
will become the most populous country in the world in just 14 years' time, when
it will have about 1.45 billion inhabitants.
For many in India, becoming the
most populous country will be an achievement, marking the country's progress in
its rivalry with China.
For others, particularly from the older generations, it
represents a failure of the country's decades-old attempts to bring its population
under control - which included a controversial and counter-productive mass
sterilisation campaign during the 1970s.
In fact, birth rates have fallen significantly in almost all
parts of India, driven by female education, rising household incomes and
greater availability of contraception though this has been partially offset by
increased life expectancy.
India's population is likely to reach about 1.6 billion in the
2060s, before decreasing to about 1.5 billion by the end of the century.
By then, according to the UN study, Nigeria may have overtaken
China as the second most populous country.
INDIA WAS ONCE AN ISLAND
India was once a continent. More
than 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, most of what is
now India was an island.
It had broken off from an ancient
supercontinent referred to as Gondwanaland by paleogeographers (named after
Gondwana, a forested area of central India), and was moving slowly northwards.
About 50 million years ago, dinosaurs
by now extinct, the India continental plate collided with Asia, buckling the
coastal area of both continents and creating the Himalayas - the world's
youngest major mountain range - and, of course, the highest.
Evidence of this ancient history
is provided by fossilised sea shells that can still be found high in the
mountains. The plate on which the subcontinent rests continues to press slowly
northwards, and is the reason why the height of Mount Everest increases
slightly every year.
MULTILINGUAL
India has, arguably,
greater linguistic diversity than any other large country.
The precise
number of languages spoken in India is probably over 1,000, but it is often
hard to define when one language begins and another ends.
The 1961 census
of India listed 1,652 languages, though some of these may have effectively been
dialects, and a few languages have died out since then.
The big six
languages - Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu - are each spoken
by more than 50 million people.
A total of 122
languages are each spoken by more than 10,000 people.
India doesn't
have a national language. Hindi and English are both official languages, though
the writers of the constitution envisaged a transitional status for English, but
opposition to Hindi hegemony from speakers of other languages, particularly
Tamil, mean that English remains an official language.
Indian languages
belong to four of the world's major language groups: Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic
and Tibeto-Burman.
Until the mid-20th
Century, the Bantu language group, which originates in Africa, was also
represented by speakers of the Sidi language used by migrants from East Africa
living in western India.
The language has
now died out, though members of the Sidi community still use a few words of
Bantu origin.
MEGACITIES
India has three
of the world's top ten megacities - one more than China.
According to the
UN, Delhi is now the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world, with
Mumbai ranked seventh and Calcutta tenth.
The population
of Delhi and its immediate urban hinterland is now over 22.65 million, and is
only surpassed by Tokyo.
In the 17th
century, Delhi was briefly the most populous city in the world, but by 1960, Delhi
was not even in the top 30. The growth since then had been more than 4% per
annum.
That growth rate
is beginning to fall, but it is still over 3% annually.
That represents
a yearly increase in population - through childbirth and migration - of about 700,000
people, putting a severe strain on the resources of India's capital.
Water remains a
major problem - with almost quarter of the city's household not having a
regular water supply.
Six other Indian
cities - Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Surat - feature in
the UN's top 100 urban agglomerations.
417,037, 606 VOTERS
India prides
itself on being the world's largest democracy (Chinese voters do not directly
elect their country's rulers), and precisely 417,037, 606 people voted at the
last parliamentary election in 2009 - a turnout of slightly under 60%.
There were 830,866
polling stations, including one, in the western state of Gujarat which had a
single voter, a temple caretaker.
The Election
Commission of India advises that that no voter should have to travel more than
two kilometres to the nearest polling station, and that, if necessary, a
separate polling station can be set up for the inmates of a leprosy sanatorium.
India also holds
the record for the most candidates for a single constituency - 1,032 candidates
stood for the Modakurichi assembly seat in the Tamil Nadu state elections in 1996.
All but two of
the candidates lost their deposit, and 88 candidates did not get a single vote.
IF INDIA WAS A MUSLIM STATE
India has the
second (or third) highest population of Muslims in the world.
Even though less
than 15% of Indians are Muslim, the country's enormous population means that by
this measure it outranks all Muslim-majority countries, except Indonesia and
possibly Pakistan. (There are almost exactly the same numbers of Muslims in
Pakistan as in India).
The first
Muslims in India are thought to have been traders who came to Kerala during the
lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Millions of Muslims migrated at the time of
independence to either West or East Pakistan (the latter became Bangladesh in 1971),
but huge numbers also remained behind.
Today, the only
Muslim-majority areas of India are the Kashmir valley, and the tiny Indian
Ocean territory of Lakshadweep.
India's Muslims
are quite thinly spread across the rest of the country, though they are almost
non-existent in parts of the north-east and in Punjab.
DEADLY ROADS
There are more
road deaths in India than any other country in the world.
This is a
statistic that won't surprise many visitors, for whom the roads of India are
often terrifying.
Officially about
115,000 people die on Indian roads each year - though a recent British Medical
Journal study suggests that the true number of fatalities is closer to 200,000.
Among the stark
figures to emerge from the BMJ report are that 37% of all road deaths are
pedestrians, with a further 28% for cyclists and motorcyclists, and that 55% of
all fatalities occur within five minutes of the road incident.
The study
recommends more speed bumps, greater enforcement of greater use of safety
helmets, and more fines and suspensions for drivers who break traffic rules.
In fact, although
India has by the far the highest number of total road deaths, the per capita
figure for several other countries, led by Eritrea and the Cook Islands, are
much higher.
MOST INDIAN FILMS ARE NOT
BOLLYWOOD
India has the
world's largest film industry.
More than 1,100
movies are produced, on average, each year - that's slightly ahead of Nigeria, twice
as many as the American film industry and ten times as many as Britain produces.
Most of the
Indian films are not, as is often supposed, products of Bollywood, the nickname
given to Mumbai's Hindi movie industry which is responsible for roughly 200
films a year.
Almost as many films
are made each year in both Tamil and in Telugu, the two most widely spoken
southern Indian language - and Chennai and Hyderabad are major film productions
centres.
However, India
comes only sixth in terms of cinema box office receipts - behind the USA, China,
Japan, UK and France.
MANGOES GALORE
India is the
world's biggest producer and consumer of mangoes.
For many people,
the greatest delight of the hot Indian summer is the profusion of mangoes - officially
India's national fruit.
There are
several hundred varieties of Indian mango, of which more than 30 are
commercially available.
Everyone seems
to have their favourite, and I have witnessed furious argument about which is
the best mango.
I have also
discovered that it is possible to cause great offence in Mumbai, by suggesting
that the local mango, the Alfonso, is not the best in the world.
More than 40% of
the world's annual output of mangoes are grown in India, far ahead of the
competition from China, Thailand and Bangladesh.
RECORD BREAKER
India is more
obsessed with breaking records than any other country. Not something that I can
prove with official sources, but I am pretty sure it is true.
According to the
Guinness Book of World Records, India ranks third behind the USA and the UK in
the number of records claimed each year.
Among the recent
additions was the largest gathering of people (891) dressed like Mahatma Gandhi.
But this leaves
out the large number of often bizarre and obscure record claims that never make
it to the Guinness Book, but that are compiled in similar local compendiums
such as the Limca Book of Records and the India Book of Records.
The records
include the longest garland made of cakes of cattle dung (2 km) , for
performing yoga on horseback (10 hours) , and for lighting electric bulbs by
passing a wire through one's nose and out of one's mouth (30 sixty-watt bulbs)
. Sometimes record-seekers go too far - as do their parents.
In 2007, a 15-year-old
boy, under the watchful eye of his doctor parents, performed a caesarean
section in a hospital in Tamil Nadu, in an attempt to be recognised as the
world's youngest surgeon. Unsurprisingly, the police and the medical
authorities took a dim view of this particular attempt on a world record.
Source : bbc.com
