Number 1: India is about 1/3 the size of the United States, yet it is the second most populous country in the world, with a population of 1,166,079,217. India is the seventh largest country in the world, at 1.27 million square miles.
Number 2: India is the largest democracy in the world.
Number 3. The Kumbh Mela (or Grand Pitcher Festival) is a huge Hindu religious festival that takes place in India every 12 years. In 2001, 60 million people attended, breaking the record for the world’s biggest gathering. The mass of people was photographed from space by a satellite.
Number 4: Many Indians find toilet paper repellent and consider it cleaner to splash water with the left hand in the appropriate direction. Consequently, the left hand is considered unclean and is never used for eating.
Number 5: To avoid polluting the elements (fire, earth, water, air), followers of Zoroastrianism in India don’t bury their dead, but instead leave bodies in buildings called “Towers of Silence” for the vultures to pick clean. After the bones dry, they are swept into a central well.
Number 6: It is illegal to take Indian currency (rupees) out of India.
Number 7: India leads the world with the most murders (32,719), with Russia taking second at 28,904 murders per year.
Number 8: Varanasi is one of the oldest inhabited places on earth dating back to at least 5,000 years.
Number 9: More than a million Indians are millionaires, yet most Indians live on less than two dollars a day. An estimated 35% of India’s population lives below the poverty line.
Number 10: Cows can be found freely wandering the streets of India’s cities. They are considered sacred and will often wear a tilak, a Hindu symbol of good fortune. Cows are considered one of humankind’s seven mothers because they offer milk as does one’s natural mother.
Number 11: Dancing is one of India’s most highly developed arts and was an integral part of worship in the inner shrines of every temple. It is notable for its expressive hand movements.
Number 12: India invented the board game Snakes and Ladders principally based on the Vedic idea or Karma
Number 13: Shampoo was first documented to be used in India.
Number 14: Mawsynram is the wettest place on earth with 11,873 mm of rain annually.
Number 15: India is the birthplace of chess. The original word for “chess” is the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning “four members of an army”—which were mostly likely elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers.
Number 16: The Indian flag has three horizontal bands of colour: saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for truth and peace, and green for faith, fertility, and chivalry. With the wheel of life as its emblem
Number 17: India is the only country on earth with a bill of rights for cows.
Number 18: The earliest cotton in the world was spun and woven in India. Roman emperors would wear delicate cotton from India that they would call “woven winds.” Mogul emperors called the fabrics “morning dew” and “cloth of running water.”i
Number 19: A voting poll booth was set up for just 1 voter in Gujarat.
Number 20: The Himalayas—from the Sanskrit hima, meaning “snow,” and alaya, meaning “abode”—are found in the north of India. They extend 1,500 miles and are slowly growing taller, by almost an inch (2.5 cm) a year. Several ancient Indian monasteries are found nestled in the grandeur of these mountains.
Number 21: India is the world’s largest producer of dried beans, such as kidney beans and chickpeas. It also leads the world in banana exports; Brazil is second.
Number 22: India has the largest number of vegetarians in the world.
Number 23: With 150,000 post offices, India has the largest postal network in the world.
Number 24: In India, grasping one’s ears signifies repentance or sincerity.
Number 25: The Bengal tiger is India’s national animal. It was once ubiquitous throughout the country, but now there are fewer than 4,000 wild tigers left.
Number 26: Indians hold prominent places both internationally and in the United States. For example, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla), the creator of the Pentium chip (Vinod Dahm), the founder/creator of Hotmail (Sabeer Bhatia), and the GM of Hewlett-Packard (Rajiv Gupta) are all Indian among many others.
Number 27: India is the second largest English speaking nation in the world.
Number 28: The British Raj, or British rule, lasted from 1858 to 1947 (although they had a strong presence in India since the 1700s). British influence is still seen in Indian architecture, education system, transportation, and politics. Many of India’s worst famines are associated with British rule in India.
Number 29: Every major world religion is represented in India. Additionally, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism all originated in India. The philosophers Aristotle’s and Plato are also reported to have noted that Judaism originated in India.
Number 30: About 80% of Indians are Hindu. Muslims are the largest minority in India and form approximately 13% of the country’s population. In fact, India has the third largest population of Muslims in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan.
Number 31: India has the world’s largest movie industry, based in the city of Mumbai (known as the “City of Dreams”). The B in “Bollywood” comes from Bombay, the former name for Mumbai.
Number 32: Mumbai (Bombay) is India’s largest city, with a population of 15 million.
Number 33: Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) is known around the world as Mahatma, which is an honorific title meaning “Great Soul” in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. He devoted his life to free India from British rule peacefully and based his campaign on civil disobedience. His birthday, October 2, is a national holiday. He was assassinated in 1948.
Number 34: The lotus is sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists. The Bahá’í house of worship in Delhi, known as the “Lotus Temple,” is shaped like a lotus flower with 27 gigantic “petals” that are covered in marble.
Number 35: The banyan, or Indian fig tree, is considered a symbol of immortality and is mentioned in many Indian myths and legends. This self-renewing plant is India’s national tree.
Number 36: Marigold flowers are used as decoration for Hindu marriages and are a symbol of good fortune and happiness.
Number 37: The official name of India is the Republic of India. The name “India” derives from the River Indus, which most likely is derived from the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning “river.” The official Sanskrit name of India is Bharat, after the legendary king in the epic Mahabharata.
Number 38: Cricket is India’s most popular sport. Hockey is considered the national sport, and the Indian field hockey team proudly won Olympic gold in 1928.
Number 39: Indians made significant contributions to calculus, trigonometry, and algebra. The decimal system was invented in India in 100 B.C. The concept of zero as a number is also attributed to India.
Number 40: The national fruit of India is the mango. The national bird is the peacock.
Number 41: Most historians agree that the first recorded account of plastic surgery is found in ancient Indian Sanskrit texts.
Number 42: Hindi and English are the official languages of India. The government also recognizes 17 other languages (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Nepali, Manipuri, Konkani, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu). Apart from these languages, about 1,652 dialects are spoken in the country.
Number 43: .India’s pastoral communities are largely dependent on dairy and have made India the largest milk-producing country in the world.
Number 44: India has the world’s third largest road network at 1.9 million miles. It also has the world’s second largest rail network, which is the world’s largest civilian employer with 16 million workers.
Number 45: Rivers have played a vital role in India’s popular culture and folklore—they have been worshipped as goddesses because they bring water to an otherwise dry land. Bathing in the Ganges in particular is thought to take away a person’s sins. It is not unusual to spread a loved one’s ashes in the Ganges.
Number 46: India has the worlds highest rail bridge in Jammu.
Number 47: Most Indians rinse their hands, legs, and face before eating a meal. It is considered polite to eat with the right hand. Wasting food is considered a sin.
Number 48: Banra-Worli sea link has steel wires equal to earths circumference.
Number 49: It is traditional to wear white, not black, to a funeral in India. Widows will often wear white in contrast to the colourful clothes of married or single women.
Number 50: All of India is under a single time zone.
Number 51: On India’s Independence Day, August 15, 1947, the country was split into India and Pakistan. The partition displaced 1.27 million people and resulted in the death of several hundred thousand to a million people.
Number 52: The most visited place in the world is the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Number 53: India experiences six seasons: summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer monsoon, and winter monsoon.
Number 54: India is the world’s largest tea producer, and tea (chai) is its most popular beverage.
Number 55: The world’s highest motorable road greets you at Ladakh at an elevation of over 19,300 feet.
Number 56: Current accepted history suggests that the first and greatest civilization in ancient India developed around the valley of the Indus River (now Pakistan) around 3000 B.C. Called the Indus Valley civilization, this early empire was larger than any other empire, including Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Number 57: India has the first hospital train in the world.
Number 58: India is the only country to have an entire ocean named after it, i.e. Indian Ocean. Commonly, there are a total of five oceans in the world, namely; Atlantic Ocean, Arctic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean.
Number 59: Navi Mumbai, a planned satellite township of Mumbai, is the largest planned city in the world.
Number 60: Chandragupta Maurya (340-290 B.C.), a leader in India who established the Mauryan Empire (321-185 B.C.), was reported to have been guarded by a band of women on horseback.
Number 61: When the first independent prime minister of India, pacifist Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), was featured in Vogue, his distinctive close fitting, single-breasted jacket briefly became an important fashion statement for the Mod movement in the West. Named the Nehru jacket, the prime minister’s coat was popularized by the Beatles and worn by such famous people as Johnny Carson (1925-2005) and Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990).
Number 62: India is home to Fauja Singh – the oldest marathon runner in the world.
Number 63: India is also the country in which the highest number of votes were cast for a national general election. In 2009, the country saw its 417 million people cast their votes in five phases to elect the 543 members of the 15th Lok Sabha.
Number 64: India’s space program is among the top five space programs in the world despite having budget constraints.
Number 65: The City Montessori School, in Lucknow, is the world’s largest school in terms of students with over 45,000 inductees.
Number 66: In 1928, India was so good at Hockey that the British withdrew from the Amsterdam Olympics to avoid a possible embarrassing defeat by its own colony. What the British feared happened! The Indian team won the Olympics Hockey final beating Holland 3-0. And the team repeated their triumph in the Olympics in 1932 as well.
Number 67: ISRO built India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, which was launched by the Soviet Union on 19 April 1975.
Number 68: Over 4700 daily newspapers in more than 300 languages are produced in India.
Number 69: The world’s lightest satellite was not built by a renowned space agency like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) but by a bunch of Indian science enthusiasts from Chennai, Tamil Nadu? The satellite that weighed only 64 grams is the world’s smallest and lightest satellite till date and was launched into space with the help of a NASA rocket.
Number 70: Another satellite made by the same group of space enthusiasts that weighed only 1.26 kg, the Kalamset-V2, was launched by the Indian Space and Research Organization from its Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. According to the ISRO chief K. Sivan, “Kalamset-V2 was the lightest satellite to be ever built and launched into orbit.”
Number 71: The largest wholesale spice market of Asia is in India – Khari Baoli, New Delhi.
Number 72: In 1948, the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded. It would have been awarded to Mahatma Gandhi, however, due to his assassination; it was left unassigned in his honor. The Nobel Committee declined to award a prize on the ground that “there was no suitable living candidate” that year. Interestingly, Mahatma Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January 1948.
Number 73: The Human Calculator, Shakuntala Devi is a math prodigy from India. She could calculate 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 and provided the correct answer in mere 28 seconds.
Number 74: Apart from the U.S. and Japan, only India has built a super computer indigenously.
Number 75: Yoga originated from India and is still in existence for over 5000 years.
Number 76: Takshila, the first-ever university in the world started around 700 BC in India.
Number 77: Benaras, now known as Varanasi is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Buddha had also visited it.
Number 78: India has the world’s largest attended events. The biggest of which is ‘Kumbha Mela’ of 2001 – attended by 60 million people and was seen from space.
Number 79: India has the world’s highest cricket ground which is in Chail, Himachal Pradesh. It is 2444 meters above sea level and was built in 1983.
Number 80: The Brihadeswara Temple is situated in Tamil Nadu is the first granite temple of the world. It was built in just five years during the 11th century.
Number 81: India was one of the richest countries in the world before the colonisation.
Number 82: India has never invaded or attacked any country in its entire history.
Number 83: Vande Mataram is India’s national song and Jana Gana Mana is its national anthem.
Number 84: Indira Gandhi was India’s first and the only female Prime Minister till date.
Number 85: White tigers are only found among Indian tigers.
Number 86: The largest dam is the Hirakud Dam in Orrisa.
Number 87: The first mining of diamonds was done in India.
Number 88: India was the first to detect water on the Moon. India’s first Moon Satellite Chandrayaan-1 took the honour.
Number 89: The Worlds largest sundial is in India.
Number 90: In some parts of India Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola are used as pesticides.
Number 91: The Kumbh Mela is visible from space
Number 92: India has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world.
Number 93: In addition to being well known as the holiest city in India, Varanasi is also known as the birth-place of Ayurveda and Yoga and their ancient healing systems.
Number 94: Approximately 70% of the worlds spices come from India.
Number 95: India currently has the tallest statue in the world. Measuring 600ft (182m) in height, the Statue of Unity is currently the tallest statue in the world. The statue, which is a tribute to the independence leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, is located in the western state of Gujarat, where Patel was born.
Number 96: India was the first country in the world to refine and consume sugar.
Number 97: India is the 3rd largest economy in the world.
Number 98: India’s government is a federal parliamentary constitutional republic. They have a President, Vice President, Prime Minister, Speaker of the House and Chief Justice
Number 99: India’s currency has braille on it for the blind.
Number 100: It is predicted that India will be the world’s youngest country by 2020, with the median age being 29 years.