I've been excited about the prospect of visiting India for some time now, and reading about it is only making me keener. Check out these selected facts that I gleaned from a bunch of articles in Time magazine:
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India is home to one-sixth of the world's population, and is second only in size to China (though India is projected to overtake China in 2030).
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Five people die in traffic accidents in Delhi every day.
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Fully three-quarters of the structures in Delhi violate building standards in some way.
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Population growth is 2 per cent per year, less than half the rate it was before Nehru's family planning programme in 1951 (which was the first one among developing nations). That's still 18 million new mouths to feed every year, or more than half the population of Canada appearing every year in a country less than one-third of the size.
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Delhi is the world's fourth most polluted metropolis. One report estimates that the average Delhi-wallah inhales the toxic equivalent of the smoke from 20 cigarettes every day.
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The population of India is 950 million1. Of these, 350 million are living below the poverty line (as many as those living in India at Independence), and 250 million are middle class.
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Of these 950 million, most are Hindus; there are over 100 million Muslims (only Indonesia and Pakistan have more), 20 million Christians, 18 million Sikhs, 7.5 million Buddhists, 4 million Jains, and lots of other minority faiths. It's amazing that the country hasn't succumbed to mass violence or dictatorship; indeed, the world's largest democracy is relatively docile, outside of hotspots like Kashmir and the activities of Tamil sympathisers in the southeast.
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More than a million people in Delhi live rough in homemade squats called jhuggi bastis; some even illegally tap into the electricity supply. They endure dysentery, cholera and dengue fever, and one in ten babies born to them dies in its infancy. They struggle to eke a living as construction workers, rickshaw peddlers, street hawkers or servants.
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Delhi is full of historical buildings; there have been at least eight cities there in the last 3000 years, and some scholars say there have been up to 15. Traffic on one of New Delhi's main thoroughfares has to swerve around the masonry slab that marks a Muslim saint's grave; meanwhile the fairways at Delhi Golf Club have some unique hazards in the shape of royal tombs.
Is it any wonder I've been excited about visiting India for some time now? Compared to the indifference I felt when I read the guidebooks on Southeast Asia, India is a major draw card. As I touched down in Calcutta on the morning of I couldn't wait. I wasn't to be disappointed.
1 It has since smashed through the one billion limit and is climbing all the time...