50 Amazing Facts about India | Amazing Facts 4U
- There are in fact 12 Delhi’s in India apart from the country’s capital.
- The amazing fact is that India gets roughly the same number of tourists annually as the city of Venice and even smaller countries like Vietnam in spite of its diversity.
- More than 30% of all the pending cases in courts across India are either related to cheque bounce or traffic challans.
- The amazing fact is that only about 35 million Indians pay income tax that comes to less than 3 in 100 people.
- In Bangalore, this year, the government shamed property tax defaulters by sending drummers to makes noise and wave banners outside of their properties until they paid their taxes.
- The 2012 North Indian power blackout affected 620 million people or 9% of the world’s population. It was in fact the largest power outage in human history.
- There is an amazing bank in Udaipur that collects Mother’s milk called ‘Divya Mother Milk Bank’ to provide milk to newborns who can’t have their mother’s milk for any reason.
- Amazingly less than 25 percent of the world’s Punjabi Sikh population actually lives in India.
- In order to promote lower birth rates, Indian authorities have created a sterilization lottery. Individuals that volunteer to be sterilized are given 600 rupees (About $10) and their names are put into a lottery to win televisions, motorcycles, food processors, and the grand prize, a Tata Nano.
- India is in fact the world’s largest beef exporter
- A monument called ‘Zero Mile Stone‘ in Nagpur, Maharashtra indicates the geographical center of India.
- Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India in fact contribute the highest number of UN Peacekeeping troops in the world.
- The border between India and Pakistan is visible from space at night.
- The world’s largest school in the world is City Montessori School of Lucknow. About 400000 pupils are enrolled.
- The record for the most qualified person in India was held by a politician Dr. Shrikant Jichkar. He was an ex-IAS & IPS, doctor, painter, photographer, actor, active ham radio operator, and youngest MLA at 25, who once held 14 portfolios as a minister. Amazingly He had 20 degrees, won 28 gold medals & had a library of 52,000 books.
- Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay was the unsung hero of IVF (in vitro fertilization), who pioneered India’s first test-tube baby in 1978, but was not recognized by the then Indian medical fraternity, and committed suicide three years later due to depression.
- Narayana Murthy, Co-founder of Infosys one of the most recognized software company was a firm believer of communism, but during a foreign visit, for having talked against the Bulgarian government with a co-passenger on a train, he was jailed for four days without food, which led him to become a capitalist and an entrepreneur.
- India has in fact the largest oil refinery in the world at Jamnagar Gujarat owned by Reliance Industries with a daily refining capacity of 668,000 barrels.
- It’s amazing that all the Top 10 stores in the world by the number of pizzas sold in a year are from India.
- Amitabh Bachchan’s Indian movie “Abhimaan” was very popular in Sri Lanka more than in India and was screened continuously for 85 weeks in the same movie theater, Empire, Colombo.
- The fact is it will take India 51 years to double its population. For Poland, it will take 1,387 years.
- In 2011, Guinness officially acknowledged Asha Bhosle as the most recorded artist in music history for recording up to 11,000 solo, duet, and chorus-backed songs in over 20 Indian languages since 1947.
- In the Battle of Longewala during the Indo-Pak War of 1971, 120 Soldiers of the Indian Army amazingly defeated 2800 Soldiers of Pakistan.
- In parts of India, especially Bihar, grooms are often kidnapped by the bride’s family due to escalating demand for dowries and are forcefully married off.
- India’s Parle-G biscuits were the world’s No. 1 selling biscuits.
- Cherrapunji in Meghalaya India has the distinction of being the wettest place on earth with rainfall of about 400 to 500 inches per year, but its residents have an amazing problem of water shortages because Cherrapunji is built on a foundation of porous limestone and all the water that falls from the sky falls right through the ground like a sieve and into the valley.
- India does not have a National Language, Hindi, and English are two Official Languages.
- The amazing fact is that Sanjiv Mehta, a Mumbai-born entrepreneur in the UK now owns The East India Company that ruled India for few centuries.
- Of the countries with nuclear weapons, only China, India, and North Korea have a declared “no first use” policy.
- Some ritual chants of Kerala, India have patterns, but no known meaning. They can’t be written down and can only be transmitted orally. No language has phonetic equivalents for it. Their nearest analog is bird songs! These oral traditions are actually bird vocalizations that originated before human speech.
- The amazing fact is Indians were not allowed to board the Palace on Wheels luxury train meant just for foreigners for quite a while since its launch on Republic day 1982.
- An India-based Neutrino Observatory is being been expected to be completed in 2015 in the Theni District of Tamil Nadu. It is going to be one of the biggest experimental particle physics projects undertaken in India that will house the world’s most massive magnet, four times larger than the 12,500-tonne magnet used in the CERN in Switzerland.
- Amazingly in the Eastern states of India, there are 500 years old man-made bridges weaved from living roots of trees that can withstand the monsoon floods and don’t ever rot, instead they grow stronger with time.
- From 1928-1972, India won a medal for field hockey in every Olympics (7 golds, 1 silver, 2 bronze). In 1976, the field was switched from grass to expensive synthetic turf. In the 9 Olympics since India has won only 1 medal (gold in 1980).
- Global warming has solved a land dispute over an Island between India and Bangladesh called New Moore Island by submerging it in the sea.
- The amazing fact is that in 2011, India released a 108-year-old prisoner, who was serving a life sentence for killing 4 people in 1987 when he was 84.
- The number of cellphone subscribers in India amazingly increased by 16,420% in one decade between 2001 and 2011.
- An underground coalfield fire in Jharia (Jharkhand), India in fact has been burning since 1916 and is yet to be extinguished.
- Shaving brushes are made from boar & badger hair that India produces in huge quantities, yet only in India can you get brushes made out of nylon-only bristles.
- There’s a Banyan tree in Kolkata India that covers about 4 acres and is 250 years old. The central trunk was hit by lightning in 1925 and later removed, but the tree has about 3300 aerial roots.
- India is the world’s largest milk producer, putting out almost 3 times what Pakistan produces that is No. 2 producer. That’s amazing 68% of the world’s milk from 12.5% of the people.
- Navi Mumbai, a planned satellite township of Mumbai, was developed in 1972 and is in fact the largest planned township on the planet.
- Viswanathan Anand from India is the first player in chess history to have won the World Championship in three different formats: knockout, tournament, and match.
- Lonar Lake, a saltwater lake in Maharashtra, was created by a meteor hitting the Earth and is one of its kind in India.
- English Actor Sir Ben Kingsley who played the role of Gandhi in “Gandhi” has a birth name as ‘Krishna Pandit Bhanji’ and he is of Indian (Gujarati) descent.
- Mount Kailash a very sacred mountain for Hindus which is in fact in China has never been climbed despite the Chinese government’s support of the climbers.
- India has three antarctic stations, Dakshin Gangotri, Maitri, and Bharathi.
- One of the oldest colleges of Engineering in the world is in Chennai, College of Engineering (Guindy) which was established in 1794.
- It’s amazing that the average cost of census taking in India is just $0.5 per person (US: $40, World Average: $5).
- Amazingly India Post allows you to order personalized stamps with your picture on them.
Find more nuggets of wisdom on our website: www.wisdomquotesandstories.com
){kind=link}