INDIA

India, officially the Republic of India is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. India is a federal constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system consisting of 29 states and 7 union territories. A pluralistic, multilingual, and multi-ethnic society, the country is also home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.

India comprises the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, and part of the Indo -Australian Plate. India’s defining geological processes began 75 million years ago when the Indian plate, then part of the southern super continent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by sea floor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyn oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian plate.These dual processes, driven by convection in the Earth’s mantle, both created the Indian Ocean and caused the Indian continental crust eventually to under-thrust Eurasia and to uplift the Himalayas. 

Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Cut off from the plain by the ancient Aravalli Range lies the Thar Desert.

The original Indian plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India. It extends as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India. These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats, the plateau contains the country’s oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitude and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude.

The climate of India comprises a wide range of weather conditions across a vast geographic scale and varied topography, making generalisations difficult. Based on the Koppen system, India hosts six major climatic subtypes, ranging from arid desert in the west, alpine tundra and glaciers in the north, and humid tropical regions supporting rainforests in the southwest and the island territories. Many regions have starkly different microclimates. The nation has four seasons: winter (January and February), summer (March to May), a monsoon (rainy) season (June–September), and a post-monsoon period (October–December).

India’s geography and geology are climatically pivotal: the Thar Desert in the northwest and the Himalayas in the north work in tandem to effect aculturally and economically important monsoonal regime. As Earth’s highest and most massive mountain range, the Himalayas bars the influx of frigidkatabatic winds from the icy Tibetan Plateau and northerly Central Asia. Most of North India is thus kept warm or is only mildly chilly or cold during winter; the same thermal dam keeps most regions in India hot in summer.

Though the Tropic of Cancer—the boundary between the tropics and subtropics—passes through the middle of India, the bulk of the country can be regarded as climatically tropical. As in much of the tropics, monsoonal and other weather patterns in India can be wildly unstable: epochal droughts, floods, cyclones, and other natural disasters are sporadic, but have displaced or ended millions of human lives. There is one scientific opinion which states that South Asia is likely to see such climatic events, along with their aleatory unpredictability, to change in frequency and are likely to increasein severity. Ongoing and future vegetative changes and current sea level rises and the attendant inundation of India’s low-lying coastal areas are other impacts, current or predicted, that are attributable to global warming.

Indian people or Indians are citizens of India, the second most populous nation containing 17.50% of the world’s population. “Indian” refers to nationality, not ethnicity or language. The Indian nationality consists of many regional ethno-linguistic groups, reflecting the rich and complex history of India. India hosts all major ethnic groups found in Indian Subcontinent. The diaspora populations with Indian ancestry, as a result of emigration, are somewhat widespread most notably in the UAE, Southeast Asia, United Kingdom, North America,Australia, South Africa and Southern Europe. Population estimates vary from a conservative 12 million to 20 million diaspora. 

Religion in India is characterised by a diversity of religious beliefs and practices. The Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of some of the world’s major religions; namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Throughout India’s history, religion has been an important part of the country’s culture. Religious diversity and religious tolerance are both established in the country by the law and custom; the Constitution of India has declared the right to freedom of religion to be a fundamental right.

The western and northern part of India have been the home of one of the most ancient civilisation of the world called Indus valley civilisation. Most of the shrines, ancient temples of Hinduism and the birthplace of Hindu saints are in India. Allahabad hosts the biggest religious festival Kumbhamela, where Hindus from all over the world come together to take a bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers of India: Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati. It is also home of around 90% world population of Hindus. The Indian diaspora in the West has popularised many aspects of Hindu philosophy such as yoga,meditation, Ayurvedic medicine, divination, karma, and reincarnation. The influence of Indian religions has been significant all over the world. Several organisations, such as the Hare Krishna movement, the Brahma Kumaris, the Ananda Marga, and others have spread Indian spiritual beliefs and practices.