India

INDIA

India the “Spiritual Land” has achieved very important socioeconomic advances since it became an independent nation on August 15th 1947. However, it has not been easy to become an important industrialized economy in the world. India has gone through so many phases until it has finally achieved its actual constant growth.[1]

This summary report intends to analyze India in allits aspects; such as political, cultural, social, economical and geographical, looking to have a general idea of India’s profile to find out how all the different aspects mentioned before influence to do business, and come up with a conclusion to know whether India is or not a good country to invest in.

Now, talking about the demographic aspects it’s important to know that India belongs tothe Asian continent; it covers an area of 32,872,631 squared kilometers. The country is surrounded by the Bay of Bengal in the east, the Indian Ocean in the south and the Arabian Sea in the west.[2] As we can see in the maps, its three most important neighbors are China, Pakistan and Bangladesh. India has twenty three cities; the main four cities are Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi and Chennai. Thepopulation of India estimated at the end of 2007 was 1.2 billion[3].

The climate varies from one place to another; the entire country has a tropical weather marked by a relatively high temperature and dry winter. Rainfalls are heavy in the north-eastern region, compared to part of the peninsula.2

India natural resources are coal (fourth-largest reserves in the world), oil which accountsfor 30 percent of India’s total energy consumption and natural gas.[4]

Once we have mentioned all the general aspects about India, it is important now to move to the economical topic which is the part we are most concern about; since India has been growing constantly even though the whole world is going through this huge crisis.

In 2007/08 India’s GDP reached 9%, this year it isestimated to have a 6.2% which is still a high and positive growth. Its profits exportations were in 2007/08 of 158.8 thousand millions and it is estimated for 2008/09 to increase up to 178.9 thousand millions[5].

The imports are bigger than the exports with 223.7 thousand millions (2007/08) and 257.8 approximately (2008/09) which means that India has undoubtedly opened to foreign investment.This factor could be one of the reasons why India has being improving its unemployment rate. In 2007/08 the rate was 7.8 and it’s estimated to improve for 2009 to 7.2%.5 In fact, the World Bank announced on the Indian Inform 2009 that it is expected the incorporation of 80 million workers during the next decade after the new labor reform legislation.

All this economical improvements also havea lot to do with the expansive politic that the government has been implementing; such as investing on infrastructure and basic services like education, public health and creating jobs on the rural areas.5

Now we are going to talk about India’s political context. India, also known as Bharat, is a Union of States. It is constituted as a Sovereign Socialist Democratic Republic, and it uses aparliamentary system of government. The Republic is governed under the rules of the Constitution of India, which came into force on January 26th, 1950; only three years after India achieved its independence from British rule. After this extremely difficult moment for the country, Indians were looking to establish in their Constitution what they considered to be three fundamental aspects, justice,liberty and equality, thus creating a Socialist Republic within a democratic framework.[6]

The Constitutional head of the Executive is the President. Along with the president, the Council of the Parliament of the Union is composed of two Houses, which are the House of States, and the House of the People. The House of States is composed by 250 members, 12 of which are nominated by the...