India: Fast Facts

If your most vivid impressions of India come from old National Geographics and Rudyard Kipling’s jungle stories, update your mental file with these facts:

• India’s 1.07 billion people—second only to China in total population—are 80 percent Hindu. But more than 130 million Muslims call India home (some estimates range above 150 million). That rivals the combined population of all countries in the Arab Middle East.

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• Indian teenagers spend $3 billion a year on fashion accessories.
• Massive rural-to-urban migration will likely double the population of India’s cities within two decades. That’s equal to “all of Europe, all of a sudden, needing water, sanitation, drainage, power, transportation, housing,” says an Asian Development Bank official.
• Want to tap into a youth movement of gargantuan proportions? No fewer than 555 million Indians are under age 25.
• Indian universities produce more than 1.5 million graduates each year.
• India has some 200 million English speakers. The nation’s vast collection of peoples also speak several hundred other languages and dialects.
• Three Indians made TIME magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people this year: Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and IT industry mogul Azim Premji (reputedly the world’s fourth-richest man).
• Despite economic growth, India has the world’s largest number of working children (up to 115 million); many toil in sweatshops. Meanwhile, many of the graduates pouring out of the nation’s universities can’t find decent jobs. The government counts 40 million jobless workers, while the vaunted Indian info tech industry employs fewer than 1 million.
• India and its immediate South Asian neighbors have more than 200 people groups with populations exceeding 1 million.
• Nearly half of the world’s unreached people groups live in India and the South Asian region. They have yet to be touched by the Gospel in any significant way.
• India alone is home to 14 different “super-mega” people groups (more than 10 million members each) who are currently “unengaged” by a church-planting movement strategy. In other words, Christians are not yet focusing on any of these groups in a way that will result in growing, self-sustaining church movements. Just one of these ethnic peoples, the Rajput, totals 40 million souls.
• South Asia, which includes India, has half of the world’s Last Frontier population—more than any other region.