India's population will (probably) overtake China's in 2028.
For many in India, becoming the
most populous country will be an achievement, marking the country's
progress in its rivalry with China.
For others, particularly from the older generations, it
represents a failure of the country's decades-old attempts to bring its
population under control - which included a controversial and
counter-productive mass sterilisation campaign during the 1970s.2. India dahulunya adalah Sebuah Pulau
India was once a continent. More than 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, most of what is now India was an island.
It had broken off from an ancient supercontinent referred to as Gondwanaland by paleogeographers (named after Gondwana, a forested area of central India), and was moving slowly northwards.
About 50 million years ago, dinosaurs by now extinct, the India continental plate collided with Asia, buckling the coastal area of both continents and creating the Himalayas - the world's youngest major mountain range - and, of course, the highest.
3. India punya Beragam Bahasa
ndia has, arguably, greater linguistic diversity than any other large country.
The precise number of languages spoken in India is probably over 1,000, but it is often hard to define when one language begins and another ends.
The 1961 census of India listed 1,652 languages, though some of these may have effectively been dialects, and a few languages have died out since then.
The big six languages - Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu - are each spoken by more than 50 million people.
A total of 122 languages are each spoken by more than 10,000 people.
4. India Punya Banyak Megapolitan
India has three of the world's top ten megacities - one more than China.
According to the UN, Delhi is now the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world, with Mumbai ranked seventh and Calcutta tenth.
The population of Delhi and its immediate urban hinterland is now over 22.65 million, and is only surpassed by Tokyo.
In the 17th century, Delhi was briefly the most populous city in the world, but by 1960, Delhi was not even in the top 30. The growth since then had been more than 4% per annum
5. Pemilih Terbanyak
India prides itself on being the world's largest democracy (Chinese voters do not directly elect their country's rulers), and precisely 417,037, 606 people voted at the last parliamentary election in 2009 - a turnout of slightly under 60%.
There were 830,866 polling stations, including one, in the western state of Gujarat which had a single voter, a temple caretaker.
6. Muslim Kedua Terbanyak di Dunia
India has the second (or third) highest population of Muslims in the world.
Even though less than 15% of Indians are Muslim, the country's enormous population means that by this measure it outranks all Muslim-majority countries, except Indonesia and possibly Pakistan. (There are almost exactly the same numbers of Muslims in Pakistan as in India).
7. Jalanan Paling Mematikan
here are more road deaths in India than any other country in the world.
This is a statistic that won't surprise many visitors, for whom the roads of India are often terrifying.
Officially about 115,000 people die on Indian roads each year - though a recent British Medical Journal study suggests that the true number of fatalities is closer to 200,000.
Among the stark figures to emerge from the BMJ report are that 37% of all road deaths are pedestrians, with a further 28% for cyclists and motorcyclists, and that 55% of all fatalities occur within five minutes of the road incident.
The study recommends more speed bumps, greater enforcement of greater use of safety helmets, and more fines and suspensions for drivers who break traffic rules.
In fact, although India has by the far the highest number of total road deaths, the per capita figure for several other countries, led by Eritrea and the Cook Islands, are much higher.
8. Kebanyakan Film India bukanlah dari Bollywood
India has the world's largest film industry.
More than 1,100 movies are produced, on average, each year - that's slightly ahead of Nigeria, twice as many as the American film industry and ten times as many as Britain produces.
Most of the Indian films are not, as is often supposed, products of Bollywood, the nickname given to Mumbai's Hindi movie industry which is responsible for roughly 200 films a year.
Almost as many films are made each year in both Tamil and in Telugu, the two most widely spoken southern Indian language - and Chennai and Hyderabad are major film productions centres.
9. Galeri Mangga Terbesar di Dunia
India is the world's biggest producer and consumer of mangoes.
For many people, the greatest delight of the hot Indian summer is the profusion of mangoes - officially India's national fruit.
There are several hundred varieties of Indian mango, of which more than 30 are commercially available.
Everyone seems to have their favourite, and I have witnessed furious argument about which is the best mango.
10. Pemecah Rekor Terbanyak
India is more obsessed with breaking records than any other country. Not something that I can prove with official sources, but I am pretty sure it is true.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, India ranks third behind the USA and the UK in the number of records claimed each year.
Among the recent additions was the largest gathering of people (891) dressed like Mahatma Gandhi.
But this leaves out the large number of often bizarre and obscure record claims that never make it to the Guinness Book, but that are compiled in similar local compendiums such as the Limca Book of Records and the India Book of Records.
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