India is the seventh largest country in the world, and has the second largest population. It is a democratic, parliamentary, bicameral republic. The Head of State is the President, who is elected by an electoral college for a 5-year term. The President chooses the Prime Minister, who acts as leader of the government.

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA), supported by diverse left-wing parties and members of the opposition nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), regained power in the 2009 general elections, but left-wing representation was reduced by a significant degree. Manmohan Singh became the first PM to be re-elected after completing a 5-year term since 1961, when Nehru was re-elected.

The Constitution mandates a secular government and ensures freedom of religion. At state level, the governments are elected at regular intervals, except when the President intervenes under the system known as Presidents Rule. Elections are held on the basis of universal suffrage and are considered to be free and fair.

Women hold 59 of the 545 seats in the Lower House (10.8%) and 25 in of the 242 in the Upper House (10.3%) . The main parties have women representatives at all levels. Since 1992, 30% of local elected councils (Panchayats) must be women. The minorities take part in both local and national politics. The judiciary is independent, but runs up a tremendous backlog of cases; allegations of corruption are commonplace. Transparency International , in its 2010 Corruption Perception Index, put India in 87th place out of 178 countries and points out that corruption is a widespread public practice.

Since 1974 India has been a nuclear power and maintains its policy of "non-first-use" On 10 October 2008, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement was signed putting an end to restrictions on trade in nuclear technologies, with the result that India became the sixth-largest nuclear power.
Its considerable economic growth has placed India among the countries known as BRIC (emerging countries). The country has focussed in particular on IT and technological services. India has continued to strengthen its strong links with the USA and Europe on the basis of increasing opportunities for commerce and business.
In 2010, the government's internal agenda was largely dominated by continuing armed conflicts and insurgencies in a number of regions, such as those in Jammu and Kashmir, the areas with Maoist presence in central India, Manipur, and in the north-east. According to the 2010 Report issued by Human Rights Watch , there is continuing alarm over the impunity with which the security forces commit abuses within the context of these conflicts.

After the conclusion of the Sri Lanka campaign to defeat the Tamil Tigers in 2009, India provided humanitarian aid for re-housing displaced persons, and called for political reconciliation. However, it has continued to avoid any responsibility for atrocities committed during the conflict by the Sri Lanka forces and the Tamil Tigers.

In July 2010 when India was visited by General Than Shwe, leader of the dictatorship in Burma, the Indian government made no mention of the human rights situation in Burma, or of the need to establish an international commission to investigate the crimes committed by the military junta, nor of the many serious irregularities that characterised the national elections held in Burma on 7 November 2010. Relations with Pakistan continue to be tense, particularly after it emerged that Pakistani military intelligence agents may have provided support for the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack in Mumbai in November 2008.

Relations with China suffered setbacks during 2010. China disapproves of India's continuing support for Tibetan refugees, and that the country provides a refuge for the Tibetan government-in-exile. Nevertheless, China and India agreed to settle their differences through continuing dialogue.

Discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, place of birth or social status is outlawed, and efforts are made to protect these rights. However, both socially and culturally discriminatory practices continue to exist against women, disabled persons, national, racial and ethnic minorities, and against homosexuals. The caste system still divides society, and violent incidents continue to occur between groups of different origins. Different laws are enacted for Muslims and Hindus. For Muslims, laws on family, inheritance, and divorce are in accordance with traditional Islamic law (Sharia).

The law on freedom of information allows citizens to request and obtain documents in the public domain, but the law regulating freedom of information is unclear and in practice it is difficult to access documents. Internet cafes are required to monitor Internet use and to inform the authorities of offences. The 1885 Indian Telegraph Law (still in force, although amended) authorises monitoring of telephone calls and interception of private mail in times of public emergency or "in the interests of security or public tranquillity". Governments of all leanings have used these powers.

Courts do not admit confessions extracted through torture or by force, but reports show that torture and financial extortion are commonplace. The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act prohibits human trafficking, but the problem remains and a number of officials have been accused of facilitating this activity. India is a point of origin, transit, and destination for victims of human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution and forced labour.

More than 2.3 million women and girls are involved in prostitution. The ILO estimates that 15% of the country's prostitutes are girls; a UN report estimated that 40% are under 18.

Homosexuals are regularly harassed and castigated, and human rights groups state that gay and lesbian rights are not viewed as human rights. Homosexuals who do not hide their sexuality lose their jobs, are victims of assault, rape and blackmail, and may be held in clinics for months where they are subjected to treatment against their will. Based on a decision in 2009 given by the High Court of Delhi, government officials promised to eliminate section 377 of the Criminal Code, a provision which is often employed abusively so as to treat consenting adult homosexuality as a crime.

UNAIDS , in its latest report, estimates that in 2009 2.5 million people were living with HIV in India, 800,000 of them women. There are no accurate data on the number of children infected with the virus or of children orphaned by AIDS. According to a Human Rights Watch survey, HIV-positive children are sometimes refused treatment, and some schools expel or segregate children because they or their parents are HIV-positive. Orphanages and other residential institutions do not admit HIV-positive children. The law now states that HIV-positive persons cannot be dismissed from their employment, but in practice this legislation has had no noticeable impact.

India has 20 % of the world's adolescent population. Government figures show that out of the 200 million children aged between 6 and 14, 165 million attend school. However, UNICEF maintains that there are 203 million children of that age and that only 120 million attend school. The policies approved since 2002 to provide compulsory, free-of -charge primary education have not been effectively applied by the government.
There are reports of children being subjected to abuse in both private and state schools. Organisations for the protection of child rights continue to report the use of corporal punishment in schools.
In Jammu and Kashmir, there were several children among the dead and injured during the 2010 anti-government demonstrations. The children detained for allegedly taking part in the protests were imprisoned along with adults, in breach of laws on young persons. Although the government issued a directive to prevent security forces from using schools as advance posts during operations launched against Maoists in Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, the order is not effectively applied, causing violence and constant interruptions to children's education. Maoist insurgents continued bombing the state schools and attempting to recruit children as soldiers.

ECE begins at age 3 and lasts for 3 years. At this level, 49% of education is private. The Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) is 27%. There are 600,391 ECE teachers (95% women). The number of pupils per teacher (PTR) is 40: 1.

At present, education is not compulsory. Primary education begins at age 6 and lasts for 5 years. 17% of primary education is private. The Net Enrolment Ratio is 91% (47% girls). Of pupils enrolled in the first-year course, 79% stay on to the last year of Primary Education. 4% of pupils have to repeat a year's course. There are 3,038,204 primary teachers (44% women). The PTR is 40: 1.

Secondary education begins at age 11 and lasts for 7 years. 1% of lower secondary pupils study technical training programmes. 42% of secondary education is private. The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) is 60%. 5% of pupils have to repeat a year's course. There are 2,507,237 teachers in secondary education, 1,297,011 (37% women) in lower secondary and 1,210,346 (32% women) in upper secondary. The PTR is 32: 1 in lower secondary and 37: 1 in upper.

1,4862,962 students (39% female) attend tertiary institutions, giving a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 13%. Foreign students studying in India come from Asia (3,851), Sub-Saharan Africa (1,673), Arab States (843), North America and West Europe (435), Central and East Europe (40) and Latin America and the Caribbean (28). Meanwhile, there are 123,559 Indian students studying abroad, mainly in the USA (79,736), Australia (15,742), the UK (14,625), Germany (4,237) and New Zealand (324).

The Disabled Persons Act provides equal rights for all persons with disabilities, but its effect has been minimal as the government has not provided sufficient resources for developing support programmes. Discrimination persists in education and other public services. Schools lack accessible infrastructure for the disabled. However, the disabled rights movement is slowly raising public awareness. The Rajasthan High Court required the government to establish special education schools for children with disabilities within the public and private sectors, but teachers have not been trained to meet the needs of disabled children and the cost of admission to these specialised schools is beyond the reach of many families. Legislation requires 3% of school places to be reserved for children with disabilities, but children with disabilities make up only 1% of pupils in the schools. Reports claim that most colleges and universities are unaware of this law. The support, scholarships, tax exemptions and budget funds for special education are supposed to be for rehabilitation courses for persons with disabilities, but the funds have not been used to the full nor distributed fairly.

The law does not provide for asylum or refugee status to be granted in accordance with the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, and the government has not established a system to provide protection for refugees and asylum seekers.

Tibetan people who reach India via Nepal normally lack valid travel documents and the majority are then unable to obtain legal residency permits. Many of them travel to India through isolated mountain passes and do not have visas or any official travel document. According to sources at the American Embassy in New Delhi, the reason for the 2008 decrease in the number of Tibetan refugees fleeing to India is that China is using the Nepalese police to detain the refugees at the border.

The government provides assistance to the resettlement camps for Tibetan and Sri Lanka Tamil refugees, but not for refugees from Bangladesh, as they are classed as economic migrants. Refugees are allowed to work and their children to attend school.

The caste system discriminates particularly harshly against the Dalit (untouchables in Hindi). The rural Dalit, the country's poorest people, work as unpaid labourers for landowners. They are not permitted to own land and are usually illiterate. Breaching the strict rules on caste can lead to reprisals from violent vigilante groups. Despite the constitutional safeguards, the rights of indigenous groups are not respected. The indigenous people suffer discrimination and harassment, are deprived of their land and are victims of torture and arbitrary arrest. Minority organisations can reserve places for minorities in schools and universities.

Academic freedom is restricted in a number of ways. Strict academic directives regulate links between local and western universities. Central universities are required to obtain permission from the government before organising "any kind of foreign collaboration and other international academic exchange activities" such as seminars, conferences, workshops and research. These directives are still in force. There is a list of books which cannot be imported or sold in the country. Internet access can be restricted for reasons of public morality or in the interests of national security, while "unauthorised access to certain types of electronic information" is a criminal offence.

On account of the increasing threat of privatisation, it is vital to continue insisting that academic freedom is essential for ensuring the highest academic level possible and curriculum development to respond to future needs. The State and the private sector must acknowledge that there cannot be learning and development in higher education when academic freedom is not respected.

Numerous laws exist to protect women's rights, but they are not strictly enforced and protection is very poor, particularly in rural areas. Sexual harassment is commonplace but in most cases is not reported, such as dangers that women face at work: verbal or physical abuse from superiors, restricted use of toilets and inability to stop work for lunch. Both in rural and urban areas women are paid less than men for the same or equivalent work. Economic discrimination both in access to work and to credit prevents women from having their own property and businesses. Women take longer to climb the professional ladder, and it is difficult for them to reach their rightful place in employment hierarchies. Psychiatric hospitals and mental health centres are required to check the legitimacy of insanity certificates, which are sometimes used by husbands as grounds for divorce. Prison officers use prisoners as domestic servants, and sell female prisoners into prostitution. Infanticide of new-born girls remains a problem. Although amniocentesis and sonogram tests for sex determination are banned, family planning centres reveal the sex of the foetus, and pregnancies continue to be terminated to ensure male children are born. The states of Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, as well as parts of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka, have particularly low male/female ratios; Punjab has the lowest, with 793 women per thousand men.

Violence against women continues to be a major problem. Gang rape is a ploy commonly used by upper caste groups to intimidate lower castes, as punishment for alleged adultery, and as coercion or revenge in disputes over property in rural areas. There is a high rate of under-age marriage: half of all Indian girls marry under the age of fifteen, despite the fact that the legal minimum age is eighteen. It is fifty years since India passed a law banning dowries, which was aimed at preventing the giving and taking of "any property or valuable object (...) before or at any moment after the wedding" by either party. Despite the fact that the law penalises the custom in unequivocal terms, dowries continue to form part of present-day India. Women's organisations in India continue to protest against the practice of demanding a dowry. Teaching materials on the issue have been issued for use in the school curriculum in Delhi. Dowry-related deaths have resulted in legislation holding the husband or his parents responsible for the unnatural death of a woman during the first 7 years of marriage. However, the law is not fully enforced. Economic liberalisation and globalisation have caused dowry transactions to become more commercialised.

It was 200 years ago that burning widows on their husbands' funeral pyres (Sati) was banned, but this, too, is still occasionally practised. Likewise, so-called honour killings still persist.

For an emerging global economic power noted for its medical skill, India still has unacceptably high rates of maternal mortality. In 2005, the last year with available data, the maternal mortality rate in India was 16 times higher than that of Russia, 10 times higher than China's, and 4 times higher than Brazil's. Of every 70 girls reaching reproductive age, one will eventually die through pregnancy, childbirth or unsafe abortions, a rate higher than in 120 countries, including neighbouring Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and the Maldives. Many more suffer avoidable injuries and infections, and are left with disabilities - often serious and lifelong - due to maternity care deficiencies. If there is little information on maternal mortality, there is even less official information available on maternal morbidity (injuries, infections, pregnancy-related disabilities, unsafe childbirth and abortions).

The ILO reports that in many aspects India is the country facing greatest difficulty in eliminating child labour .

Forced or bonded child labour is illegal, but the ban is not complied with. There is no minimum age for employment, although children under 14 are not allowed to work in hazardous industries. Children are permitted to work 6 hours per day between 8 am and 7 pm. Trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of children are growing problems. Efforts to eradicate child labour have reached only a small proportion of working children. Work conditions for many domestic servants and children are effectively those of forced labour to pay off debts. Work that girls carry out goes on largely out of sight, and is difficult to quantify.

The federal and state governments' failure to provide compulsory free-of-charge education, together with lax application of existing laws, creates ideal conditions for the perpetuation of child labour. In some religious ceremonies children are subjected to abuse, several religious sects ordain children as young as 8 years old, and the High Court has ruled that it is not illegal for small children to become monks.

Child labour is used in the textile industry, but also in mining and ICT and other industries. According to the latest government figures, India has between 14 and 16.4 million child workers. However, these figures are widely disputed and the US State Department gives a figure of around 55 million. Child labour is most common in agriculture, including production of hybrid seeds, in which UNICEF estimates that private companies employ 200,000 children just in Andhra Pradesh alone. An Indian NGO, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, reported that in 2009 children from 6 to 8 years old were working in mines in Jharkhand and Bihar extracting mica for export to the world cosmetic industry. The country is a transit route for child-traffickers transporting children to Gulf States to force them into work as camel jockeys; some of the children are barely four years old.

India has still not ratified the ILO's convention 138 on the minimum employment age, nor convention 182 on the worst kinds of child labour.

Barriers to unionisation exist, despite unions are being recognised under the law, and workers took part in protests and strikes deemed illegal with the aim of establishing basic rights for bargaining and union recognition. There have been numerous cases of violence provoked by employers and at the hands of the police against workers and union delegates.

Workers have the right to join unions. Of the more than 400 million persons in the workforce, 30 million are employed in the formal economy. The gender gap is reflected in the low female labour participation rate of 25.7%, compared to 51% for men. There are now some unions representing the informal economy and agricultural workers, but most of the 13 to 15 million union members work in the formal economy. There are five main central trade unions representing the majority of unionised workers. Collective bargaining is the usual means of setting wages in the regulated industrial sector, and the unions vigorously defend workers' rights in the procedures. The law makes clear distinction between public servants and other workers. Teachers and other public employees have very limited rights for organising and collective bargaining.

The employers' generally hostile attitude towards unions is a clear deterrent to unionisation. Employers tend to ignore the legislation outlawing dismissals for union activities, or they get round it by transferring workers to other workplaces so as to weaken union activities or discourage formation of unions.

Workers in 7 export processing zones (EPZ) have the right to form groups and bargain collectively, but there is little union activity. The majority of the work force in the EPZs are women, who often have temporary contracts with fictitious contractors rather than with actual companies. Estimates of the numbers of bonded workers range from 20 to 65 million, including a large number of children. More than 85% of bonded workers belong to the castes considered inferior. Each state government's laws set minimum wages, work-hours and health and safety standards. The Factories Act establishes a working day of 8 hours, and a 49-hour working week

On 12 February 2009, the police attacked 200 schoolteachers holding a protest for equal pay at the doors of the Legislative Assembly (Vidhan Sabha), in the police sub-division of Hazaratganj. The police arrested the teachers' leader and president, Lal Bihari Yadav, together with four other teachers on charges of creating a public disturbance. More than 24 teachers were also injured on 13 September 2009 when police in Sitapur, in Uttar Pradesh, attacked schoolteachers protesting about the brutal murder of a teacher, Aradhana Tiwari, on 10 September.

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