Indledning
To get to 15-year-old Vikas Sharma's home in Bangalore, you have to travel along a narrow dusty lane, then climb a steep flight of stairs that's draped with a neighbor's drying laundry.

Inside the tiny apartment, the bedroom Vikas shares with his younger brother is so small there's barely room for the bed and the table where the two boys study.

It may sound sparse, but the Sharma family has already come a long way. Seven years ago, they moved to Bangalore—a rapidly growing city often referred to as India's "Silicon Valley"

—from a tiny impoverished village in the northern state of Bihar, where there was no running water or reliable electricity. There was also no English-language school.

"My parents wanted us to join an English school and make our future in the big city," explains Vikas. Most Indians consider mastery of English, used in business and government, to be essential for success.

Indholdsfortegnelse
India - Introduction 2
A Tale of Two Indias 2
Britisk Indien 6
Shashi Tharoor's Stirring Speech at Oxford Union Goes Viral 11
Political Map of India 12
Hinduism 13
What Is India's Caste System? 13
India’s Caste System Is Alive and Kicking – and Maiming and Killing 17
Cow Slaughter to Be Punishable by Life Sentence in Gujarat 21
Women in India 23
'death by Dowry' Claim by Bereaved Family in India 23
India's Shame 26
Can an Advert for Tea Really Change India's Sexist Attitudes? 28
Business in India 30
Bengaluru: What's Next for India's Tech Capital? 30
What Has 'make in India' Made for India? 33
Fiction 36
Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies 36

Optimer dit sprog - Læs vores guide og scor topkarakter

Uddrag
Living on $2 a Day
Another reason India's rise has been slower than China's is its democratic, but chaotic, system of government.

China's authoritarian regime can pretty much move mountains to make way for new factories or power plants or cities as it sees fit, without having to worry about opposition

—China's people know how dangerous that can be. But in India, as in other democracies, competing interests and politics slow the pace of change—or sometimes block it altogether.

More than a third of Indians are illiterate, and India's education system is stymied by corruption and incompetence. The country's infrastructure—its roads, bridges, airports, and railroads—needs drastic improvement.

To keep pace with the millions of Indians who are migrating to cities in search of better lives million by 2030, according to the McKinsey Global Institute

—India should be building the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago every year. And that kind of development just isn't happening.

At the same time, India remains a country of extreme poverty. About 40 percent of Indians live on less than $1.25 a day, and almost 70 percent live on $2 a day or less, according to the World Bank.

Another challenge is India's caste system, which goes back to the ancient origins of Hinduism, the country's majority religion.

The rules governing caste are brutally simple: If you are born into a high caste like the priestly caste, you can be a priest or do other kinds of white-collar work.

Being born into a lower caste might relegate you to life as a carpenter or a toilet cleaner. India's constitution outlawed caste discrimination in 1950

and its Congress later set quotas for members of lower castes in schools, state-owned firms, and government ministries. But caste discrimination persists, especially in rural areas.

Despite all these challenges, India continues to grow at an impressive pace—the only major economy growing faster is China. By 2020, India's middle class will be 500 million strong, according to McKinsey.

Outsourcing U.S. Jobs
"When you grow at 9 percent a year, year after year, you pull tens of millions of people out of poverty,"

says Sadanand Dhume, an Indian journalist who is writing a book on the country's middle class.

The change has been striking. There are thousands more cars on the road every week, and now an Indian company is selling a tiny car called the Nano for just $2,900.

In big cities, construction is everywhere, and shopping malls are opening everywhere. "Some of the statistics are mind-boggling," says Ulrich Bartsch, the senior economist in the World Bank's India office.

"From basically zero 10 years ago, India now has 500 million cellphones. You can go to rural areas in the middle of nowhere—the desert in Rajastan—and your BlackBerry works."

Many international companies are setting up factories and offices in India to take advantage of its large pool of English speakers and comparatively low wages.

(American companies operating in India is the premise for the NBC sitcom Outsourced, about a Kansas City company that moves most of its jobs to India and sends an American to run its operation.)

American tech companies have been operating call centers in India for years. Now companies like Microsoft and Yahoo are also setting up research facilities in India, with Indians doing the kind of advanced technical work that until recently was done in the U.S.

The Sharma family has directly benefited from the country's rapid growth. Vikas's father, who builds furniture for new homes, dropped out of school when he was young.

His mother, who never went to school, now works as a seamstress in a garment factory. Neither speaks English. They migrated to Bangalore in the hope that educating their children would provide a way out of poverty.