INDIA A COUNTRY ON THE MARCH
• Population growth
This graph shows the sharp rise in the population of India over the last sixty years... India is
a fast-growing country... Since 1941, India’s population has been multiplied by four / has
risen fourfold: it has increased from 319 million to 1.2 billion...
India’s population is growing faster than China’s and it is expected to overtake China in
population size by 2030... It is estimated to reach 1.7 billion people in 2050...
• Languages
41% of the Indian population speak Hindi which is, by far, the most widely spoken language in the Indian subcontinent... It is followed by Bengali spoken by only 8.1% of the population...
The ten other languages which appear in the graph are spoken by even fewer people...
• Sectors of activity
This bar chart underlines the evolution in percentage of GDP of the three main sectors of activity:agriculture, industry and services... It allows us to compare the percentage of GDP each sector
represented in 1990 and in 2009... While the agriculture and industry sectors have both decreased in share of GDP – agriculture by 12.5% and industry by 5% –, that of the service sector has increased dramatically... It now represents 62.6% of GDP which is a rise of almost 18%...
• Religions
Hinduism is the religion practised most in India with 80.5% followers... The second most
important religion is Islam: 13.4% of Indians are Muslims... Christians come next with 2.3%
of the population... Sikhs, Buddhists, Jainists are less numerous, each religion being followed
by less than 2% of the Indian population...
2.
Many changes have occurred in India over the last thirty years:
– The population has increased rapidly...
– The needy / underprivileged are less numerous than thirty years ago, even though many
Indians still live below poverty line... Fewer people are poverty-stricken nowadays: 42% of
Indians lived on less than 80p a day in 2005 whereas in 1981 there were 60%...
– The service sector is expanding (62.6% of GDP in 2009 compared to 44.7% in 1990) while
the agriculture and industry sectors are steadily declining...