India

India is a very big country in Asia.

The sea is on two sides of it. Very tall, snowy mountains stand in the north. The capital city is called New Delhi. Lots and lots of people live in India.

India fills most of South Asia. Much of it is a peninsula, a piece of land with water on three sides: the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east. In the north, the Himalayas form a huge wall of mountains between India and the rest of Asia.

India is the seventh-largest country in the world by area. It is made up of 28 states and 8 union territories, and its capital is New Delhi. About 1.46 billion people lived there in 2025, more than in any other country, and they speak hundreds of different languages.

India, officially the Republic of India (Bharat in Hindi), occupies the greater part of South Asia. Together with Bangladesh and most of Pakistan it forms a subcontinent, set apart from the rest of Asia by the Himalayas and neighboring ranges. Much of its territory is a peninsula between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, which meet at Cape Comorin (Kanniyakumari), the southern tip of the mainland. At 3,287,263 square kilometers, it is the seventh-largest country in the world.

India is a federal republic of 28 states and eight union territories, with its capital at New Delhi. The World Bank put its population at about 1.46 billion in 2025, and Britannica reports that United Nations estimates made India the world's most populous country in 2023. Britannica describes the population as highly diverse, with thousands of ethnic groups and hundreds of languages.

New Delhi is India's capital city.

Mumbai is a big city by the sea. Its huge railway station looks like a palace. The Taj Mahal is made of white marble. It has a big round dome.

New Delhi was built in the 20th century, just south of the old city of Delhi, to be the center of India's government. In Delhi stands the Red Fort, a palace fort with walls of red sandstone, built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. India's independence was first celebrated there.

In Agra, the white marble Taj Mahal sits beside the Yamuna River in a huge garden. Emperor Shah Jahan built it between 1632 and 1648 in memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. In Mumbai, on the Arabian Sea, the grand Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, built over 10 years from 1878, is used by more than three million travelers every day.

New Delhi was built in the 20th century just south of the historic hub of Old Delhi as India's administrative center. Delhi's Red Fort Complex, a World Heritage Site since 2007, shows the final flourishing of Mughal architecture, which UNESCO describes as a fusion of Islamic, Persian, Timurid and Hindu traditions; it was where Indian independence was first celebrated, and still is. The Qutb Minar, a red and buff sandstone minaret built between 1199 and 1503, is the tallest masonry tower in India at 72.5 meters.

The Taj Mahal in Agra (inscribed 1983) was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, from 1632 to 1648. Masons, stone-cutters, inlayers, calligraphers and dome builders came from across the empire and from Central Asia and Iran, and Ustad Ahmad Lahori was the main architect. In Mumbai, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus, inscribed 2004), designed by F. W. Stevens and built from 1878, blends Victorian Gothic Revival with Indian traditional architecture; British architects worked with Indian craftsmen on it.

The Himalayas are in the north of India.

Some of the tallest mountains in the world are there. In summer, big rains come. This rainy time is called the monsoon. In the far west there is a big, sandy desert.

Millions of years ago, the land that is now India slowly drifted north and crashed into the rest of Asia. Slices of rock were pushed up onto India's northern edge and became much of the Himalayas. The push still goes on, so the mountains are still rising and earthquakes are common. India's highest point is Kanchenjunga, 8,586 meters tall, on the border with Nepal.

South of the mountains lies the wide Indo-Gangetic Plain, filled with mud and sand that streams carried down from the mountains. Farther south is the Deccan, a high, old plateau. Most of India's rain comes with the monsoon, from about mid-June to early October, when winds blow in from the Indian Ocean carrying wet air.

India's landmass forms the northwestern part of the Indian-Australian Plate, which drifted north after breaking away from the supercontinent Gondwana. It collided with the Eurasian Plate about 50 million years ago and was thrust beneath it at a low angle; that subduction continues, so the Himalayas are still rising and earthquakes are common. Kanchenjunga (8,586 m), on the Nepal-Sikkim border, is the world's third-highest peak and India's highest point.

South of the Himalayas is the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and beyond it the Deccan plateau, mostly 300 to 750 meters high and the oldest, most stable land in India. Britannica calls India the world's most pronounced example of a monsoon climate: in the southwest monsoon, from about mid-June to early October, moist winds from the Indian Ocean bring about three-fourths of the year's rain. The Western Ghats, a 1,600 km chain of mountains along the west coast, intercept those winds; UNESCO counts them among the world's eight 'hottest hotspots' of biological diversity, with Sri Lanka.

The Bengal tiger is India's national animal.

It has orange fur with black stripes. Big gray rhinos live in tall grass. Peacocks have bright, beautiful feathers. Herds of elephants live in the forests too.

The Bengal tiger is India's national animal. Tigers live in forests in many parts of India and in the Sundarbans, the biggest mangrove forest in the world, where they can swim long distances. Special tiger reserves have helped their numbers grow to several thousand.

India is home to almost half of all the Asian elephants in the world. In Kaziranga National Park in Assam, one-horned rhinoceroses graze on wet grasslands; the park helped save them when they were almost gone. The peacock is India's national bird, and the long-snouted gharial lives in big rivers such as the Ganges.

India lies in the Oriental biogeographic region, and Britannica counts more than 1,200 bird species, roughly one-eighth of the world's. The endangered Bengal tiger is the national animal; once near extinction in India, tigers have increased to several thousand, largely thanks to the reserves of Project Tiger. In the Sundarbans (inscribed 1987), the largest mangrove forest in the world and the only one inhabited by tigers, they live an almost amphibious life, swimming long distances.

Kaziranga National Park (inscribed 1985), on the Brahmaputra floodplain in Assam, saved the Indian one-horned rhinoceros from the brink of extinction around 1900 and now holds the species' largest population. The Smithsonian notes that almost half of the world's Asian elephants live in India, though poaching, crop protection incidents and road accidents kill about 200 elephants there each year. The Indian peafowl is the national bird, and the gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), a long-snouted crocodilian, lives in large rivers including the Ganges and Brahmaputra and their tributaries.

More people live in India than in any other country.

People speak many different languages. Hindi and English help people from different places talk. Many meals have rice or other grains, lentils and spices.

About 1.46 billion people lived in India in 2025. They speak hundreds of languages. Hindi is used in one form or another by about two-thirds of people, and English links people across the country. Many states have their own official languages, such as Tamil, Bengali or Marathi.

India does not have just one kind of food. Lentils, called dal, and grains are part of many meals. In the south, rice is eaten with sambhar, a stew of lentils and vegetables. In the north, many dishes use milk, ghee and paneer cheese. Across India, food is often eaten by hand.

India's population was about 1.46 billion in 2025 (World Bank), and in 2018 about two-thirds of people lived in rural areas. Its languages come from four main families, Indo-Iranian, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman, plus a few isolates. Hindi and English are the official languages of the national government, and 22 scheduled languages have official recognition in the states. Hindi is used in some form by about two-thirds of the population, Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam by about one-fourth, mostly in the south; English, although a mother tongue for few, is the most widely used lingua franca.

India has no official religion. Most people follow Hinduism, and Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains together make up a significant share. Britannica stresses that India has no single cuisine: dal may be the closest thing to a national dish, rice is the staple in the south and northeast, dairy such as ghee and paneer is common in the north, and Gujarat's food is mostly vegetarian.