The bottom line on India
India facts
- Population 1,065,500,000
- Area 1,268,884m2
- GDP £2,063 trillion
- GDP growth rate 8.2%.
India accounts for 17% of the world’s population, but only 2% of global GDP and 1% of world trade
- Percentage of GDP spent on R&D 0.8%
- Annual science budget £2.25bn
- Annual enrolments at graduate level and above 9.84 million (2004)
- Pool of young university graduates (with seven years or less of work experience) 14 million.
Every year India produces 2.5 million new graduates in science, engineering and IT
- Engineering graduates per year 350,000.
This is expected to rise to 1.5 million by 2015
- Percentage of population under 15 32.1%
- Percentage of population over 60 7.9%
- Broadband use Only 3% of the top three socioeconomic classes in urban India have broadband
- Colour TVs per 100 households 33.7
- Mobile phone subscribers per 100 households 2.5
- Literacy rate 68% for men, 45% for women (2000)
- Life expectancy at birth 63.3 years (2003)
- Population living on less than $1 a day 34.7%
- Number of tourists per year 3.9 million
- Patent applications 23,000 in India (2005/06), 1,164 in US (2003)
- Foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP 0.07
- R&D infrastructure 229 universities, 13 institutes of national importance, 400 government research labs and 1,300 industrial R&D units
- Amount spent by Indian companies on overseas acquisitions £3.6bn (2006)
Most deals took place in energy, pharmaceuticals, IT and telecoms
World beaters
India is No1 in the world for:
- Consumption of gold jewellery
- Production of tea, sugar cane, and milk
- Cutting and polishing diamonds
- Providing IT and related services
- Speed at which it creates wealth
Companies in the Fortune 500 index
- Indian Oil Corporation Ranked 153
- Reliance Industries India’s largest private company, sells everything from petrol to garments, ranked 342
- Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ranked 368
- Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ranked 378
- Oil and Natural Gas Ranked 402
- State Bank Of India Ranked 498
Ten most populous cities
- Mumbai 16, 368,000
- Kolkata 13,217,000
- Delhi 12, 791,000
- Chennai 6,425,000
- Bangalore 5,687,000
- Hyderabad 5,534,000
- Ahmadabad 4,519,000
- Pune 3,756,000
- Surat 2,811,000
- Kanpur 2,690,000
(Source: India National Census 2001)
Ten largest Indian communities outside India
- Myanmar 2,902,000
- USA 1,678,765
- England 1,200,000
- South Africa 1,000,000
- United Arab Emirates 950,000
- Canada 851,000
- Mauritius 715,756
- Trinidad & Tobago 500,600
- Guyana 395,000
- Fiji 336,829
(Source: Indian Ministry of Overseas Affairs)
Design
Under the new national design policy introduced this year, design is expected to be worth 1% of India’s domestic GDP by 2009. If that target is met, the value of Indian design will have grown by 1,000% by 2015. Under this plan, India aims to produce 5-8,000 designers a year through investment in new design centres.
Western companies which recently invested in Indian design include: IBM, Texas Instruments, Cisco, Philips and Whirlpool.
Indian fashion design is now worth £920m. A new ‘Designed in India’ label has been launched as a mark of quality.
Nobel Prize winners
- Rabindranath Tagore Literature (1913)
- Venkata Raman Physics (1930)
- H. Gobind Khorana Medicine (1968)
- Mother Teresa Peace (1979)
- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Physics (1983)
- Amartya Sen Economics (1998)
Upcoming trends
With biological research suffering from underfunding, Indian biotechnology has only two to three years’ growth under its belt. The National Centre for Biological Sciences claims its standards are world class and a national task force has been set up to improve India’s performance in this area.
India expects to control 51% of the outsourcing market for software and back-office services by 2008. By then, Indian exports of software and business-processing exports are expected to reach £18bn.
A new breed of transnational entrepreneur is creating micromultinationals – start-ups such as July Systems, Infinera and InSilica, with sales, marketing and brand based in the US but with a back office and technical support in India.
More than a dozen low-cost airlines have sprung up in India since the launch of Air Deccan in 2003. Air Deccan undercut its main rivals Indian Airlines, Air Sahara and Jet Airways by 30%. It now faces serious competition from SpiceJet, Go Air and Paramount Airways.
Projected GDP growth, 2006-2050
| Projected GDP growth: 2006-2050 |
£bn
(%) |
| China |
 34,490
(+2,536) |
| India |
18,367
(+4,044) |
| UK |
1,431
(+122) |
| US |
12,811
(+191) |
At speed
- 2MB per second The broadband speed MTNL will offer Delhi and Mumbai customers in 2007, officially billed ‘The year of broadband’ by the Indian government
- 28mph The average speed on Indian roads
- 31mph The speed clocked by the Indian Wild Ass, one of the nation’s fastest animals
- 89 days The average time to set up a new business in India
- 94mph The speed bowled by Sunny Pal Dhillon, winner of the 2006 Scorpio Speedster competition, Channel 7’s reality TV contest to find India’s fastest bowler
- 186mph The approximate top speed an F1 car could clock around the streets of Delhi if proposals for an Indian Grand Prix go ahead
- 217mph The speed of the high-speed trains that railways minister Lalu Prasad plans to introduce in India
In percentages
- 24 Percentage increase in government spending on science in 2005
- 25 Percentage of the world’s new workers who will join the Indian workforce between 2007 and 2010
- 25 Percentage of Indians who, in a WorldPublicOpinion poll, said India should not damage its economy to combat climate change
- 28 Percentage of foreign start-ups in the US founded by Indian entrepreneurs
- 99 Percentage of students who have their applications to join an Indian Institute of Technology rejected.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007