[HM:255640] Lesser Known facts about India

v  India leads the world with the most murders (32,719), with Russia taking second at 28,904 murders per year.

v  India has one of the world's highest rates of abortion

v  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.

v  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.

v  With 150,000 post offices, India has the largest postal network in the world. However, it is not unusual for a letter to take two weeks to travel just 30 miles.

v  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.

v  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

v  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

v  Raziya Sultana (1205-1240) was the first woman leader of India. She was considered a great leader, though she ruled for only three years before being murdered.

v  India is the world's largest tea producer, and tea (chai) is its most popular beverage

v  Greek sculpture strongly influenced many portrayals of Indian gods and goddesses, particularly after the conquest of Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. In fact, early Indian gods had Greek features and only later did distinct Indian styles emerge

v  Chandragupta Maurya (340-290 B.C.), a leader in India who established the Mauryan Empire (321-185 B.C.), was guarded by a band of women on horseback

v  India is one of only three countries that makes supercomputers (the US and Japan are the other two)

v  India is one of six countries that launches satellites.

v  The Bombay stock exchange lists more than 6,600 companies. Only the NYSE has more.

v  Eight Indian companies are listed on the NYSE; three on the NASDAQ.

v  By volume of pills produced, the Indian pharmaceutical industry is the world's second largest after China.

v  India has the second largest community of software developers, after the U.S.

v  100 of the Fortune 500 companies have R&D facilities in India

v  Thirty percent of the R&D researchers in American pharmaceutical companies are Indian Americans

v  Nearly 49% of the high-tech startups in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. are owned by Indians or Indian-Americans.

v  In a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, an Indian-American woman scientist, Dr. Ananda Chakrabaty, won the argument that persons may be granted patents for useful manufacture of living organisms. She defeated the U.S. Patent Office that argued that living things may not be patented, thus establishing the legal foundation for the biotech industry, (Diamond vs. Chakrabaty, 1980). Dr. Chakrabaty invented a microbe that eats oil spills.

v  Until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds in the world 

v  The Vishnu Temple in the city of Tirupathi built in the 10th century, is the world's largest religious pilgrimage destination. Larger than either Rome or Mecca, an average of 30,000 visitors donate $6 million (US) to the temple every day

v  The last but not least and most amazing fact for millions of Indians:  Prostitution (the exchange of sexual services for money) is legal, but a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, pimping and pandering, are crimes. The neighboring country- Bangladesh, Prostitution is legal and regulated by Govt. Bodies

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