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
A Tale of Two Indias
One of the fastest-growing countries in the world, India is emerging as a major global power. But huge challenges remain.

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.

The Sharma family is among the millions of Indians who are moving out of poverty and into the middle class, as India's economy continues to soar. They represent a bridge between two vastly different Indias:

The India they've left behind is largely agricultural, uneducated, and very poor; the new India they're grasping at has a vibrant economy with an expanding high-tech sector and is rapidly becoming a global economic power.

"You have striking growth and progress and terrible poverty and lack of progress in the same country," says Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

World's Largest Democracy
Modern India was born in 1947, when it gained independence from its longtime colonial ruler, Great Britain.

(The British partitioned the country into Hindu-majority India and the Muslim country of Pakistan.)

For more than four decades after independence, India's economy was heavily controlled by its socialist government, which meant little progress was made in tackling the country's crippling poverty.

But in 1991, the government began turning away from socialism, loosening regulations, opening India to foreign investment, and adopting other free-market practices.

The economy took off. In the 20 years since, the ranks of the middle class have more than doubled, and India has started playing a much larger role on the global stage.

"In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging," said President Obama during his trip to India in November. "India has emerged."

In recognition of India's rise, Obama pledged U.S. support for India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

With a population of 1.2 billion, India is the world's second-largest country, after China, and the world's largest democracy.

Indeed, India is now seen by many as the other rising global power—along with China—that the United States will have to compete with in the decades ahead.

"If it looks like China is a decade ahead of India, that's because it is: China started its reforms in 1979;

India only started reforming in 1991," says Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations. "You'd expect that advantage to erode as the years go on."

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.