India

India: capital New Delhi, population 1.5B, area 3,287,590 km². The 1st most populous country, in Asia. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

India fills most of the South Asian subcontinent, rising from tropical coastline to the ice of the Himalaya. Its Harappan cities were catching and storing monsoon water in cut-stone reservoirs 4,000 years ago. Four religions still practised across the world — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism — began on its soil.

• Dholavira, a Harappan city in Gujarat abandoned before 1500 BCE, was built of stone rather than brick and ringed by reservoirs cut to catch every drop of monsoon runoff.
• Between 268 and 232 BCE the emperor Ashoka had more than thirty edicts carved into pillars and cliff faces; the lion capital from one of them is now India's state emblem.
• In 1819 a British officer on a tiger hunt stumbled into the Ajanta Caves — thirty Buddhist halls cut into a gorge wall and left to the jungle for over a thousand years.
• The constitution that took effect in 1950 runs to about 145,000 words, longer than any other nation's, and has been amended more than a hundred times since.

• Aryabhata wrote in 499 CE that the stars only seem to move because the Earth turns on its own axis — against the settled view that the sky revolved and the ground stood still.
• Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training yet compiled nearly 3,900 results; the letter he mailed to Cambridge in 1913 reached G. H. Hardy and redirected number theory.
• In 1930 Mohandas Gandhi walked 387 kilometres to the sea at Dandi and picked up a lump of salt, breaking a colonial monopoly with a gesture anyone could repeat.
• Satyajit Ray shot Pather Panchali with amateur actors and an inexperienced crew, running out of money so often that it took three years; it won at Cannes in 1956.

• More than 20,000 workers laboured until 1653 on the Taj Mahal, the tomb Shah Jahan built for Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 bearing their fourteenth child.
• Chand Baori drops thirteen storeys into the ground on 3,500 narrow steps, an eighth-century stepwell built so that water stayed within reach at the end of the dry season.
• The Golden Temple at Amritsar draws over 150,000 visitors a day, and its langar kitchen gives any of them a free vegetarian meal without asking who they are.
• What is left of the Sun Temple at Konark is a thirty-metre stone chariot with wheels and horses cut from rock; the tower above the sanctuary once stood twice as high.

• Chaturanga, first recorded in India around the seventh century, is the common ancestor of chess, Chinese xiangqi, Japanese shogi and Thai makruk.
• Indian Railways runs on more than 1.2 million employees, which makes it the ninth-largest employer of any kind on the planet.
• About 660 million people attended the Kumbh Mela in 2025, nearly three times the 2019 figure and the largest human gathering anywhere in the world.
• Films are made here in more than twenty languages, and Ramoji Film City near Hyderabad, at 674 hectares, is certified as the largest studio complex in the world.

What is the capital of India?

The capital of India is New Delhi.

What is the population of India?

India has about 1.5B people — the 1st most populous country in the world.

How big is India?

India covers 3,287,590 km², making it the 7th largest country by area.

Which region is India in?

India is in Southern Asia, Asia.