India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia.
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The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions.
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Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but consolidating its sovereignty.
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India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system.
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From being a comparatively destitute country in 1951, India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class.
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India has substantially reduced its rate of poverty, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality.
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India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure.
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In North India, Hinduism asserted patriarchal control within the family, leading to increased subordination of women.
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The sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire.
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India was then no longer exporting manufactured goods as it long had, but was instead supplying the British Empire with raw materials.
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India'storians consider India's modern age to have begun sometime between 1848 and 1885.
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The appointment in 1848 of Lord Dalhousie as Governor General of the East India Company set the stage for changes essential to a modern state.
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Yet, India is shaped by seemingly unyielding poverty, both rural and urban; by religious and caste-related violence; by Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgencies; and by separatism in Jammu and Kashmir and in Northeast India.
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India's sustained democratic freedoms are unique among the world's newer nations; however, in spite of its recent economic successes, freedom from want for its disadvantaged population remains a goal yet to be achieved.
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Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal.
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India has two archipelagos: the Lakshadweep, coral atolls off India's south-western coast; and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a volcanic chain in the Andaman Sea.
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India is a megadiverse country, a term employed for 17 countries which display high biological diversity and contain many species exclusively indigenous, or endemic, to them.
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India contains four of the world's 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.
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India has two natural zones of thorn forest, one in the Deccan Plateau, immediately east of the Western Ghats, and the other in the western part of the Indo-Gangetic plain, now turned into rich agricultural land by irrigation, its features no longer visible.
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In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988.
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For most of the period between 1950—when India first became a republic—and the late 1980s, the Congress held a majority in the parliament.
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India is a federation with a parliamentary system governed under the Constitution of India—the country's supreme legal document.
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Federalism in India defines the power distribution between the union and the states.
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The Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950, originally stated India to be a "sovereign, democratic republic;" this characterisation was amended in 1971 to "a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic".
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India is a federal union comprising 28 states and 8 union territories.
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India has had tense relations with neighbouring Pakistan; the two nations have gone to war four times: in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999.
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India has close economic ties with countries in South America, Asia, and Africa; it pursues a "Look East" policy that seeks to strengthen partnerships with the ASEAN nations, Japan, and South Korea that revolve around many issues, but especially those involving economic investment and regional security.
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India conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974 and carried out additional underground testing in 1998.
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India maintains a "no first use" nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its "Minimum Credible Deterrence" doctrine.
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Since the end of the Cold War, India has increased its economic, strategic, and military co-operation with the United States and the European Union.
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India subsequently signed co-operation agreements involving civilian nuclear energy with Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
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President of India is the supreme commander of the nation's armed forces; with 1.
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India is the world's second largest arms importer; between 2016 and 2020, it accounted for 9.
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India has been a member of World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995.
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India was the world's second largest textile exporter after China in the 2013 calendar year.
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India is ranked 40th in the Global Innovation Index in 2022.
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The World Bank cautions that, for India to achieve its economic potential, it must continue to focus on public sector reform, transport infrastructure, agricultural and rural development, removal of labour regulations, education, energy security, and public health and nutrition.
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India is among the top 12 biotech destinations in the world.
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In 2006, India contained the largest number of people living below the World Bank's international poverty line of US$1.
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Since 1991, economic inequality between India's states has consistently grown: the per-capita net state domestic product of the richest states in 2007 was 3.
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India has the third-largest Muslim population—the largest for a non-Muslim majority country.
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Theatre in India melds music, dance, and improvised or written dialogue.
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India has a theatre training institute the National School of Drama that is situated at New Delhi It is an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of culture, Government of India.
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India abolished untouchability in 1950 with the adoption of the constitution and has since enacted other anti-discriminatory laws and social welfare initiatives.
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In recent decades India's improved education system is often cited as one of the main contributors to its economic development.
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India has distinctive vegetarian cuisines, each a feature of the geographical and cultural histories of its adherents.
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India has a comparatively strong presence in shooting sports, and has won several medals at the Olympics, the World Shooting Championships, and the Commonwealth Games.
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India has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1951 and 1982 Asian Games; the 1987, 1996, and 2011 Cricket World Cup tournaments; the 2003 Afro-Asian Games; the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy; the 2009 World Badminton Championships; the 2010 Hockey World Cup; the 2010 Commonwealth Games; and the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup.
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India has traditionally been the dominant country at the South Asian Games.
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