location and importance

• india is located in south asia, and is the seventh - largest country in the world by area
• one third of the area of the united states, the republic of India occupies most of the subcontinent of india in southern asia
• india borders china to the north east, other neighbours are pakistan to the west, nepal and bhutan to the north and bangladesh to the east
• most of indias large scale agriculture takes place in the Indo-Gangetic plain
• india has three major river systems which have large deltas that take over a large proportion of the land, these are the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers
• Indias climate is mainly tropical in the south and mainly temperate in the north, it has a pronounced monsoon season from June to September
• india is one of the BRIC economies and was forecast in 2001 to become the worlds third largest economy by 2020
• india has the worlds second largest population and is predicted to overtake china by 2050
• there are large inequalities in india: some people are very wealthy but the majority are poor, and over 20 percent live in poverty
• the literacy rate is still less than 70 percent
• when india achieved independence from Britain in 1947, it embarked on a largely protectionist approach to economic development
• the indian government aimed to stimulate the previously suppressed domestic market and adopted a politico - economic framework of parliamentary democracy committed to a self -reliant, panned economy
• foreign direct investment was severely restricted so that domestic industry was encouraged to produce goods for the indian market rather than importing foreign produced items
• this approach to economic development was a direct reaction to almost 300 years of colonial rule
• in 1990 india threatened to default on its loans as it had the third highest debt in the world, 72 billion, and was said to have only 2 weeks of currency reserves left to pay for imports
• india had to adopt a significant set of economic reforms in exchange for the largest loan ever given by the international monetary fund at the time
• from 1991, import quotas were removed, tariffs were reduced, the currency was devalued and foreign investment freed up
• while the inflows in the 1990s were huge compared to the past, averaging nearly 4 billion, on a per capita basis, India remained one of the least exposed countries to foreign investment in the world