Fact Sheet: The United States and India Announce Historic Trade Deal U S. Embassy & Consulates in India

Painted manuscripts of religious texts survive from Eastern India from 10th century onwards, most of the earliest being Buddhist and later Jain. During this period Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. India has a very ancient tradition of art, which has exchanged many influences with the rest of Eurasia, especially in the first millennium. Outside the caste system, and therefore of traditional Hinduism, lie people formerly called «outcastes» or «untouchables,» and now scheduled caste (a term used in India’s constitution) or Dalit, a later self-description of pride, meaning «broken» or «downtrodden». The 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in India with more than 140 million people breathing air 10 times or more over the WHO safe limit. It is estimated that approximately 40% of the population of India carry tuberculosis infection.

The original Indian plate makes its first appearance above the sediment in the ancient Aravalli range, which extends from the Delhi Ridge in a southwesterly direction. India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, and a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of faraway markets. After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, the East India Company was disbanded, and the British government began to directly administer India. Fed by diverse resentments and perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and summary treatment of some wealthy landowners and princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule.

h Republic Day Celebration 26 January, 2026

It is now generally accepted that India’s geographic position, continental outline, and basic geologic structure resulted from a process of plate tectonics—the shifting of enormous, rigid crustal plates over the Earth’s underlying layer of molten material. Three other Indian cities—Bengaluru (Bangalore), Chennai (Madras), and Hyderabad—are among the world’s fastest-growing high-technology centers, and most of the world’s major information technology and software companies now have offices in India. At independence, India was blessed with several leaders of world stature, most notably Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who were able to galvanize the masses at home and bring prestige to India abroad. Yet social legislation has done much to alleviate the disabilities previously suffered by formerly “untouchable” castes, tribal populations, women, and other traditionally disadvantaged segments of society.

In 2008, India’s share of world trade was 1.7%; in 2021, India was the world’s ninth-largest importer and the sixteenth-largest exporter. Until 1991, all Indian governments followed protectionist policies that were influenced by socialist economics. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Indian economy in 2024 was nominally worth $3.94 trillion; it is the fifth-largest economy by market exchange rates and, at around $15.0 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). There are six recognised national parties in the country, including the Indian National Congress (generally, «the Congress») and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); there and over 50 regional parties. It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitudes and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude.

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. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyan oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian Plate. Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites along the coasts of southern and eastern India. In the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers, fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. Between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, diffused into India from the northwest. The meaning of Hindustan has varied, referring to a region encompassing the northern Indian subcontinent (present-day northern India and Pakistan) or to India in its near entirety.

Language families

India became the first nation in the world to have launched over a hundred satellites in one mission. That made it the fourth country and first Asian country to do so, successfully. India sent a spacecraft to Mars for the first time in 2014. Several modern religions are linked to India, namely modern Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism.

Visual art

In 2008, a civilian nuclear agreement was signed between India and the United States. India maintains a «no first use» nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its «Minimum Credible Deterrence» doctrine. India has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty nor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, considering both to be flawed and discriminatory.

Neither mainland China nor Taiwan recognize that Arunachal Pradesh belongs to India. Indians and Tibetans see this line as the official border. In 1914, British India and Tibet agreed on the McMahon Line, as part of the Simla Accord.

• India’s early general elections saw the Congress Party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, dominate until his death in 1964.
• Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation.
• This is partly due to the very high tariffs which India charges on imported goods.
• But it is also tackling huge, social, economic and environmental problems.

The ancient Greeks called Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), which means «the people of the Indus». Most of Indians follow Hinduism at 80%, but people of different religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism and Islam also live there. India has reduced its rate of poverty but its economic inequality has increased. According to New World Wealth, India is the fifth richest country in the world with a total individual wealth of $12.6 trillion.

The number of people living in urban areas grew by 31.2% between 1991 and 2001. Migration from rural to urban areas has been an important dynamic in India’s recent history. Despite a government ban on sex-selective foeticide, the practice has far from stopped. The under-five mortality rate for the country was 113 per 1,000 live births in 1994 whereas in 2018 it reduced to 41.1 per 1,000 live births. The first post-colonial census, conducted in 1951, counted 361 million people. Increasing access to electricity and clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas have been priorities for energy in India.

In the classical period of Indian mathematics (400 CE to 1200 CE), important contributions were made by Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II, Varāhamihira, and Madhava. As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence. But in the South, under the Pallava and Chola dynasties, sculpture in both stone and bronze had a sustained period of great achievement; the bet365 India large bronzes with Shiva as Nataraja have become an iconic symbol of India. Over the following centuries a distinctly Indian style of sculpting the human figure developed, with less interest in articulating precise anatomy than ancient Greek sculpture but showing smoothly flowing forms expressing prana («breath» or life-force). Almost all surviving ancient Indian art thereafter is in various forms of religious sculpture in durable materials, or coins.

Other religions, notably Buddhism and Jainism, originated in India—though their presence there is now quite small—and throughout the centuries residents of the subcontinent developed a rich intellectual life in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, architecture, literature, music, and the fine arts. It is known from archaeological evidence that a highly sophisticated urbanized culture—the Indus civilization—dominated the northwestern part of the subcontinent from about 2600 to 2000 bce. India became the world’s most populous country in 2023, according to estimates by the United Nations. Hindi and English are the two major lingua francas, while 22 scheduled languages have official state recognition.

After the 1965 war, India began to pursue close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the central government through appointed administrators. All states, as well as the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments following the Westminster system.