Home Know India: National Portal of India

States and union territories differ in the way they are represented. In total, there are twenty-eight states and eight union territories. Most of these pieces are called states; others are called union territories. For administration purposes, India has been divided into smaller pieces.

President of India

The term Bharat (Bhārat; pronounced ˈbʱaːɾət ⓘ), mentioned in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India, is used in its variations by many Indian languages. This era was noted for creativity in art, architecture, and writing, but the status of women declined, and untouchability became an organised belief.l In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian language scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. This risked damaging the image of a country investing heavily in air transport, tourism and trade, it quoted sources as saying. On a day when the Supreme Court of India sought a progress report on the probe into an Air India plane’s June 2025 crash in Ahmedabad — 260 people were killed — an Italian newspaper came out with new claims citing sources in aviation agencies. Alongside the free trade agreement, the EU and India are also negotiating agreements on geographical indications and investment protection.

It was originally used for the Indian subcontinent and the areas to its east. By 1200 BCE, Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, spread to India from the northwest. The British administered India for a period of about two centuries and brought about revolutionary changes in the social, political and the economic life of the country. India is the world’s largest democracy and, according to UN estimates, its population is expected to overtake China’s in 2028 to become the world’s most populous nation. As the 7th largest country in the world, India stands apart from the rest of Asia, marked off as it is by mountains and the sea, which give the country a distinct geographical entity. When the two finally collided (approximately 50 million years ago), the northern edge of the Indian-Australian Plate was thrust under the Eurasian Plate at a low angle.

The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the north, creating a broad language familiy-divide, with the Indo-Aryan languages being spoken mainly in the north and west, and the Dravidian in some parts of east India and most of the south. The preferred endonym (the name given to the country by its own people) is “Bhārat” in Hindi and other Indian languages. India has the fourth largest number of spoken languages per country in the world, only behind Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria. It is made up of 28 states and eight union territories, and its national capital is New Delhi, built in the 20th century just south of the historic hub of Old Delhi to serve as India’s administrative center. Bounded by the Great Himalayas in the north, it stretches southwards and at the Tropic of Cancer, tapers off into the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal on the east and the Arabian Sea on the west. The constitution also recognises 21 other languages – either because many people speak them, or because they are very important for Indian culture.

h Republic Day Celebration 26 January, 2026

Patna was the capital of the ancient Magadha kingdom and one of the most important cities of ancient India. It is an important global wetland habitat and has been declared an International Bird Conservation Area. The twin hills of Khandagiri and Udaigiri are famous for their rock-cut caves, constructed by Jain monks during the 1st and 2nd century BC. Gurugram has a link with Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’.

India’s foreign exchange remittances of US$100 billion in 2022, highest in the world, were contributed to its economy by 32 million Indians working in foreign countries. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 forced the nation to liberalise its economy; since then, it has moved increasingly towards a free-market system by emphasising both foreign trade and direct investment inflows. The vast majority of Indians fall into the global low-income group based on average daily income. With an average annual GDP growth rate of 5.8% over the past two decades, and reaching 6.1% during 2011–2012, India is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

The name India comes from the Greek word Indus. Since its independence in 1947, India fought four wars with Pakistan and a war with China. The Indian Army is becoming more modern by buying and making new weapons. Its Commander-in-Chief is the President of India, but the Ministry of Defence manages the military. All the states (and the territories of Delhi and Puducherry) elect their local government themselves.

• 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.
• They can make any government action invalid if it contradicts the Constitution.
• It has become a very popular name for India since the middle of the 19th century.
• Chess is commonly held to have originated in India as chaturaṅga; There has been a rise in the number of Indian grandmasters.
• The Old Persian name was used for the eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire.

After the 1965 war, India began to pursue close military bet365 India 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.

A devdasi who went on to attain national and international prominence was Thanjavur Balasaraswati. Their sponsorship and promotion, however, has continued in secular, modern India.aa India also has local and modern dance traditions. Modern Indian pop takes influences from classical, folk, and western pop music. Filmi is music written for Indian cinema, generally composed by music directors and sung by playback singers. Indian music has influenced western genres, notably rock and jazz musicians during the 1960s counterculture.

Indian timeline takes us on a journey of the history of the subcontinent. In the eighth century Islam came to India for the first time and by the eleventh century had firmly established itself in India as a political force. The fifth century saw the unification of India under Ashoka, who had converted to Buddhism, and it is in his reign that Buddhism spread in many parts of Asia. India’s social, economic, and cultural configurations are the products of a long process of regional expansion.

According to some current projections, the number and severity of droughts in India will have markedly increased by the end of the present century. The Thar Desert plays a crucial role in attracting the moisture-laden south-west summer monsoon winds that, between June and October, provide the majority of India’s rainfall. The Himalayas prevent cold Central Asian katabatic winds from blowing in, keeping the bulk of the Indian subcontinent warmer than most locations at similar latitudes. The Indian climate is strongly influenced by the Himalayas and the Thar Desert, both of which drive the economically and culturally pivotal summer and winter monsoons. Coastal features include the marshy Rann of Kutch of western India and the alluvial Sundarbans delta of eastern India; the latter is shared with Bangladesh. It extends as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India.

They can make any government action invalid if it contradicts the Constitution. The Chief Justice of India is the head of the Supreme Court. They are elected directly by the people’s vote.

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.

The Indian early medieval age, from 600 to 1200 CE, was defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity. By the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Empire had created a complex system of administration and taxation in the greater Ganges Plain; this system became a model for later Indian kingdoms. Chronicling the life of the Buddha was central to the beginnings of recorded history in India. By living ethically, lay people could rise socially and morally in these religions.

India’s coastline measures 7,517 kilometres (4,700 mi) in length; of this distance, 5,423 kilometres (3,400 mi) belong to peninsular India and 2,094 kilometres (1,300 mi) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep island chains. Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal. 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. The remaining Indian Plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India. To the west lies the Thar Desert, the eastern spread of which is checked by the Aravallis. Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast crescent-shaped trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

Since 1991, India has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. India performed nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998. By 1991, no party secured a majority, but Congress formed a minority government led by P.V. The party lost again in 1989, with a short-lived National Front coalition government under V.P. However, this government lasted only about two years, with Morarji Desai and Charan Singh serving as prime ministers. India’s early general elections saw the Congress Party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, dominate until his death in 1964.

Cave paintings from the Stone Age are found across India. There may be as many as 1,652 different dialects in India. It has the status of a ‘subsidiary official language’. About 65% of Indians live in rural areas, or land set aside for farming. Over one quarter of the population (27.5%) was living in poverty in 2004–2005.

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.

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.

• Category: sisoftware.in