An activist with the Indian Farmers Union, raises a cane along with others while shouting slogans during a rally in Allahabad, India, Monday, Jan. 17, 2005. The rally was to demand the buying price of sugarcane produced by farmers be raised, and also to protest against the price hike in electricity and fertilizers. (AP Photo/ Rajesh Kumar Singh)

India is the world's largest democracy. It's an incredibly diverse country both in terms of its land and its people. In the north are the Himalaya Mountains, in the west are the deserts of Rajasthan, to the east are low-lying areas prone to flooding, and in the south are beautiful beaches lined with palm trees.

India has more than one billion people, 17 official languages and five main religions. About 80 per cent of Indians are Hindu. The second-largest religion is Islam; there are about 120 million Muslims in India. There are also millions of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.

India is struggling with huge social, economic and environmental problems as it tries to make the transition from a developing to a developed country.

Secular or religious state?

India was founded as a secular state, but the partition of British India in 1947 into India and Pakistan sparked riots and led to the largest migration in history. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims were killed and about 10 million people changed sides as Muslims in India made their way to Pakistan and Hindus in the new Pakistan headed for India.

The secular Congress party governed India for most of the country's first 50 years. There were tensions along communal lines during this period, most notably a Sikh separatist movement in the 1980s, but the government remained committed to secularism.

In the early 1990s, support grew for the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and tensions between India's Hindu and Muslim communities escalated. In 1992, a Hindu mob destroyed the Babri Mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya, claiming that it stood on the site of a former Hindu temple. More than 2,000 people were killed in the riots that ensued.

The dispute over the site in Ayodhya triggered more communal violence in early 2002. A train car carrying a group of Hindu pilgrims back from the city was attacked and set on fire by a Muslim mob in Godhra. At least 56 people were killed. Hindus in the Indian state of Gujarat rioted and over several weeks carried out revenge attacks on Muslims. More than 1,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslim. Police and government officials were accused of supporting the Hindu mobs.

A BJP-led coalition was elected in 1996 but in May 2004 the national government swung back toward secularism. The Hindu nationalist BJP was voted out and a Congress party-led coalition took over. A Sikh, Manmohan Singh, became the country's first non-Hindu prime minister.

Economy

In June 1991, India ended more than 40 years of central planning. The free-market reforms introduced in the following years generated huge private investment, boosted exports and reduced the role of the public sector. India is now second only to China as the fastest-growing economy in Asia.

The southern city of Bangalore has led India's booming IT industry. Jobs outsourced from the U.S. and U.K. have helped to create a wide range of new work for India's rapidly expanding middle class.

Unfortunately a large part of the population is being left behind, especially in rural areas. About 300 million Indians continue to survive on less than $1.25 a day.

While bureaucracy and corruption have declined in the last 15 years, it is often still hard to run businesses in India.

Spending on the military accounts for a large percentage of government expenditure and takes away much-needed resources from areas like education, health care and social welfare programs.

Society

India's population is growing at an alarming rate. From 350 million at the time of independence, India now has more than one billion people. It's on pace to pass China within 30 years to become the country with the world's largest population. Unlike Beijing and its one-child policy, New Delhi lacks a well co-ordinated strategy to encourage family planning.

The growing population is one of the reasons for the widespread poverty, especially in rural areas. According to the latest census of India, more than 60 per cent of Indians lack access to clean drinking water, 44 per cent don't have electricity, and fewer than one in 10 have telephones.

Illiteracy in India remains a serious problem. In 1950 more than 80 per cent of Indians were illiterate. Even today, more than one-third of Indians can't read and write. Many girls aren't given the opportunity to go to school and as a result there are nearly twice as many illiterate women as men.

A strong caste system, which assigns everyone a fixed place in the social hierarchy, discriminates against the country's 160 million Dalits, or Untouchables.

International relations

During the Cold War India followed a policy of non-alignment. The country continues to enjoy friendly relations with China, the U.S. and many European countries, including Russia and the U.K. Closer to home, India's relations with Pakistan have never been easy.

Pakistan and India have fought three wars since they won independence from Britain in 1947. The first two, in 1948 and 1965, were fought over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The neighbours went to war again in 1971 when India supported a separatist movement in East Pakistan. Pakistan was defeated and the eastern part of the country became the independent nation of Bangladesh.

India and Pakistan came to the brink of war again after an attack in December 2001 on India's parliament killed 12 people. New Delhi blamed the attack on Pakistani-backed Kashmiri separatist militants, but Islamabad denied this charge. It would have been the first war since the two countries became nuclear powers in 1998.

New Delhi and Islamabad have been making small but steady steps towards peace since April 2003. In a series of confidence-building measures they've restored full diplomatic ties, reopened air links and resumed a bus service between Delhi and the Pakistani city of Lahore.

• More on Indo-Pakistani relations: India & Pakistan

As India's economy grows, the country's voice on global issues becomes stronger. To reflect this, New Delhi has been lobbying for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. India, Japan, Germany and Brazil have joined forces to try to convince the UN to expand the number of permanent Security Council seats from five to nine.