Facts about India :)

Population: 1,045,845,226 (July 2002 est.)
The population clock in the Union Health Ministry, Nirman Bhavan, New Delhi, now ticks at the rate of 31 persons per minute. The clock shows that about 44,640 babies are born in India everyday. Hence the population of India increases by 16.29 million every year, which is equivalent to the total population of Australia or Japan.

The present population of India is around 1.4 Billion (1400 Million). The billionth baby is a girl. Her name is ASTHA (which means Faith). Her mother's name is Anjana Arora, and her father's name is Ashok Kumar Arora. She was born in Delhi at Saftharjung Hospital at 5.50 a.m. on Thursday, May 11, 2000.

India with about 2.4% of the land area in the world contains about 16% of the population of the world.

The density of the population in India has climbed up from 261 per square kilometer in 1981 to 267 per square kilometer in 1991. This is ten times greater than the density in the United States (26 per square kilometer) and 2.5 times greater than the density in China (109 per square kilometer).

The birth rate in India (31 per thousand people) is greater than that of China (20 per thousand people). If this trend continues, India will beat up China by 2025 A.D., making India the most populous nation in the world. In 2025 A.D, India will have 1591 million people and China 1554 million people.

Only five countries in the world - China, USA, Brazil, Indonesia, and United USSR have more population than Uttar Pradesh (145 million), which is one of the 28 states in India.

The total population of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu was 55.6 million as of 1991. About 4,478,000 people die every year in Tamil Nadu, or to put it another way, 1,227 people die every day. Every year the total Population of Australia, is added to the population of India. One out of every seven people in the world lives in India.

More people live in India than all the people living in North America, South America, and Australia put together. The death rate in India is 8.39 million per year. This means that 23,000 people everyday, 958 people every hour, or 16 people every minute

Age structure:
0-14 years: 32.7% (male 175,858,386; female 165,724,901)
15-64 years: 62.6% (male 338,957,463; female 316,063,497)
65 years and over: 4.7% (male 24,975,465; female 24,265,514) (2002 est.)

Population growth rate:
1.51% (2002 est.)
Birth rate:
23.79 births/1,000 population (2002 est.)
Death rate:
8.62 deaths/1,000 population (2002 est.)
Net migration rate:
-0.07 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2002 est.)
Sex ratio:
at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.07 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 1.03 male(s)/female
total population: 1.07 male(s)/female (2002 est.)
Infant mortality rate:
61.47 deaths/1,000 live births (2002 est.)
Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 63.23 years
female: 63.93 years (2002 est.)
male: 62.55 years
Total fertility rate:
2.98 children born/woman (2002 est.)
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate:
0.7% (1999 est.)
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS:
3.7 million (1999 est.)
HIV/AIDS - deaths:
310,000 (1999 est.)
Nationality:
noun: Indian(s)
adjective: Indian
Ethnic groups:
Indo-Aryan 72%, Dravidian 25%, Mongoloid and other 3% (2000)
Religions:
Hindu 81.3%, Muslim 12%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.9%, other groups including Buddhist, Jain, Parsi 2.5% (2000)
Languages:
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language
Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 52%
male: 65.5%
female: 37.7% (1995 est.)

Alcohol: Some Trivia

This week's trivia is about uisce beatha which literally means "the water of life" - alcohol.

The name whisky is a transformation of the word usquebaugh, itself a transformation of the Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha spelled uisce beatha in Irish Gaelic, literally meaning the "water of life".

Whisky has been produced in Scotland for hundreds of years. It is generally agreed that Dalriadan Scots monks brought distillation with them when they came to Caledonia to convert the Picts to Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Friar John Cor recorded the first known batch of scotch whisky June 1st 1495.

The origins of vodka (and of its name) cannot be traced definitively, but it is believed to have originated in either Poland or Russia. Surprisingly, until recent times there were no serious historical research on vodka as a product. Nearly all research on vodka was in fact research of drinking and selling vodka, rather than of manufacturing vodka. Paradoxically, the weakening of the Soviet Union somewhat changed this situation (but the conclusive word is yet to be said). The second half of the 1970s witnessed two massive attacks on the priority and rights of the Soviet Union to market liquors named "vodka". The first assault was a long the lines that the Russian Revolution "discontinued" Russia's trademark for vodka, which was naturally" transferred to emigrated manufacturers of vodka, Smirnoff in particular, because of prohibition by Soviets, so that officially the Soviet Union started manufacturing vodka in 1923.

This was refuted fairly easily. The second assault, by Poland, was more serious, and the Soviet Union undertook the historical research to substantiate Russia's priority, which was completed by 1979, and in 1982 the international arbitrage considered it convincing enough to grant the USSR the priority in vodka as Russian original alcoholic beverage and recognized the Soviet trademark motto "Only vodka from Russia is genuine Russian vodka".