Cultural Characteristics of India Essay Example

India is the seventh largest country, and is the most heavily populated democracy in the world. Its population is currently around 1.1 billion which compared to the United States at a population around 313 million is much larger. Currently, the largest percent of the population in India is between the ages of 15 and 64, with people under the age of 14 coming in second, and lastly people over the age of 65 (Bouchard, 2010, 2). The biggest city in India is New Delhi which has a population around 21.7 million, with the second largest Mumbai coming in around 19.7 million. The majority of the population in India speaks Hindi, but there are many different native languages including: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, and Maithili. There are three major ethnic groups in India including: Indo-Aryan which makes up about 71 percent, Dravidian 25 percent, and Mongoloid at 3 percent. In addition to several different ethnic groups, the citizens of India practice many different languages including: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh (U.S. CIA, 2011). Politically, “India’s central or union government oversees a federal republic consisting of 28 states and seven union territories” (Bouchard, 2010,2).With India being a large-power distance country I was surprised to read that in 2007 the people of India elected their first female president, Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil.

Since the early 1990’s India has been developing into an open-market economy “economic liberalization, including industrial deregulation, privatization of the state-owned enterprises, and reduced controls on foreign trade and investment, began in the early 1990’s and has served to accelerate the country’s growth, which has averaged more than 7% per year since 1997” (U.S. CIA, 2011). India’s economy is mainly comprised of village farming, agriculture, and modern industries such as computer technology and embedded software technology. With more than half