Fact Sheet: The United States and India Announce Historic Trade Deal

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.

India and Pakistan go to war over East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. India is split into two nations at independence – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. FM radio stations are plentiful but only public All India Radio can produce news. India has a burgeoning media industry, with broadcast, print and digital media experiencing tremendous growth. Since India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars over the Muslim-majority territory, which both claim in full but control in part. The Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan for over six decades.

Government and politics

In recent decades India’s improved education system is often cited as one of the main contributors to its economic development. In 1965, when the 15 years were up, the Government of India announced that English would continue to be the “de facto formal language of India”. According to an Indian government study, an additional 21 million girls are unwanted and do not receive adequate care.

• His campaign focused on a blend of economic development, national security, and social welfare programs, which resonated widely with the populace.Shri Modi’s third term is expected to build on the foundations laid during his …
• There are many mountains in the northern part of India.
• A devdasi who went on to attain national and international prominence was Thanjavur Balasaraswati.
• It happens because the deserts attract water-filled winds from the Indian Ocean, which give rain when they come into India.

The federal structure was conspicuous for the strength of the central government, which exclusively exercised control of defence, foreign affairs, railways, ports, and currency. The Constitution of India was drafted by the Constituent Assembly of India with uncommon speed and absence of irregularities between 1946 and 1949. After losing the majority in the 2024 general election, the BJP formed a coalition government with its NDA partners. Congress emerged as the largest single party and formed a coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

It is bounded to the northwest by Pakistan, to the north by Nepal, China, and Bhutan; and to the east by Myanmar (Burma). Apart from its many religions and sects, India is home to innumerable castes and tribes, as well as to more than a dozen major and hundreds of minor linguistic groups from several language families unrelated to one another. Hindi became the official language (and a number of other local languages achieved official status), while a vibrant English-language intelligentsia thrived.

Much of India’s territory lies within a large peninsula, surrounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east; Cape Comorin (Kanniyakumari), the southernmost point of the Indian mainland, marks the dividing line between those two bodies of water. Though the country’s population remains largely rural, India has three of the most populous and cosmopolitan cities in the world—Mumbai (Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta), and Delhi. The subcontinent was then partitioned along religious lines into two separate countries—India, with a majority of Hindus, and Pakistan, with a majority of Muslims; the eastern portion of Pakistan later split off to form Bangladesh.

India

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.

Similarly, the Republic of India does not recognise the Pakistani and Chinese parts of Kashmir. However, Pakistan and China do not recognise this area as part of India. For example, India claims Jammu and Kashmir as an Indian state. Different countries disagree about where India’s borders lie. This differs with names that outsiders use for the country.

The island country of Sri Lanka is situated some 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast coast of India across the Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar. 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. India’s defining geologic processes began approximately 70 million years ago, when the Indian Plate, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by seafloor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east.

Indian classical music has Vedic origins, and split in the 13th century into the two main traditions of Hindustani and Carnatic music. A later landmark in Indian mathematics was the development of the series expansions for trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, and arc tangent) by mathematicians of the Kerala school in the 15th century CE. In the 19th century, cheap Kalighat paintings of gods and everyday life, done on paper, were urban folk art from Calcutta, which later saw the Bengal School of Art, reflecting the art colleges founded by the British, the first movement in modern Indian painting.

King Shivaji used the guerrilla tactics to capture a part of, the then, dominant Mughal empire. Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was the founder of the Maratha Empire in western India. Shah Jahan, also known as Shahbuddin Mohammed Shah Jahan, was a Mughal Emperor who ruled in the Indian Subcontinent from 1628 to 1658. After the death of Harsha the Rajputs came into prominence on the political horizons of North India. Indus valley civilization, which flourished between 2800 BC and 1800 BC, had an advanced and flourishing economic system. It was followed by India’s struggle for independence, which we got in the year 1947.

India’s territory is made up of 28 states and 8 union territories, and its national capital is New Delhi. India shares borders with Pakistan to the northwest; with Nepal, China, and Bhutan to the north; and with Myanmar and Bangladesh to the east. The oldest extant mathematical document produced on the Indian subcontinent is the birch bark Bakhshali manuscript from the 7th century CE. India has the largest population of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains, the third-largest population of Muslims (after Indonesia and Pakistan) and the ninth largest of Buddhists.

Chess, which originated in India, is also becoming popular. Tennis has become popular due to the victories of the India Davis Cup team. There is also the Indian cricket league and Indian premier league Twenty20 competitions. Cricket in India is controlled by the Board of Control for Cricket in India or BCCI. The Indian cricket team won the 1983 and 2011 Cricket World Cup and the 2007 ICC World Twenty20.

The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace, and left a rich architectural legacy. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.

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. Especially important was the coming of Islam, brought from the northwest by Arab, Turkish, Persian, and other raiders beginning early in the 8th century ce. Throughout its history, India was intermittently disturbed by incursions from beyond its northern mountain wall.

India is the seventh biggest country in the world by land. In the 16th century India came under Mughal rule. The Vijayanagara empire was another significant Indian empire. There were also many other Indian dynasties (empires) such as the Chalukyas, Cholas, Pallavas, and Pandyas. It has become a very popular name for India since the middle of the 19th century. It original meaning was the northern part of India.

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 bet365 India 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.