INDIA RUBBER PLANT

also called India Rubber Tree (species Ficus elastica), large tree in its native Southeast Asia and in other warm areas but a common indoor pot plant elsewhere. It has large, thick, oblong leaves, up to 30 cm (12 inches) long and figlike fruits in pairs along the branches. The milky sap, or latex, was once an important source of an inferior natural rubber. Young plants available in the florist's trade are durable and grow well under less-than-ideal indoor conditions. Among the cultivated varieties offered are Decora, with broader and darker green leaves, and a few variegated strains, with marbled gray, cream, and white leaves or green leaves with white or yellow margins. The economy Steel foundry at the Tata truck works, Jamshedpur, Bihar, India. Since independence, India has promoted a mixed economic system in which the government, constitutionally defined as socialist, plays a major role as central planner, regulator, investor, manager, and producer. Many of its decisions are highly political, especially in its attempts to invest equitably among the various states of the union. Despite the government's pervasive economic role, large corporate undertakings dominate many spheres of modern economic activity, while tens of millions of generally small agricultural holdings and petty commercial, service, and craft enterprises account for the great bulk of employment. The range of technology runs the gamut from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. There are few things that India cannot produce, though much of what it does manufacture would not be economically competitive without the protection offered by high tariffs on imported goods. The highly regulated economic system has acted as a major deterrent to foreign trade, which, in absolute terms and in relation to total gross domestic product, is remarkably low. Foreign aid, derived mainly from the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as from many international agencies, was quite important in the first few decades after independence, but it no longer plays a key role. Formerly, a significant portion of foreign aid was in the form of food and other commodities, but it subsequently has tended to be in technological assistance and the provision of credit. Probably no more than one-fifth of India's vast labour force is employed in the so-called organized sector of the economy (e.g., mining, plantation agriculture, factory industry, utilities, and modern transportation, commercial, and service enterprises), but that small fraction generates a disproportionate share of the nation's gross domestic product, supports most of the middle- and upper-class population, and generates most of the economic growth. It is the organized sector to which most government regulatory activity applies and in which trade unions, chambers of commerce, professional associations, and other institutions of modern capitalist economies play a significant role. Much of the organized sector is unionized, and strikes are frequent and often protracted. Many of the unions are affiliated with one of a number of government-recognized and regulated all-India central trade union organizations, several of which have membership in the millions. The more important of these are affiliated with national political parties. Apart from rank-and-file labourers, the organized sector engages most of India's professionals and virtually all of its vast pool of scientists and technicians. Because most Indians are not well educated, it is not surprising that levels of productivity are generally low and rates of economic growth have at best been modest, although reasonably steady. Thus, while India's highly planned economy has made remarkable economic strides since the nation freed itself from the exploitative economic system imposed by British colonial rule, it remains among the world's poorer nations in per capita gross national product, and a large fraction of the population continues to live below the poverty line, fixed according to the amount of income required to maintain a minimally adequate diet. Resources Although India possesses a wide range of minerals and other natural resources, its per capita endowment of such critical resources as cultivable land, water, timber, and known petroleum reserves is relatively low. Nevertheless, the diversity of resources, especially of minerals, exceeds that of all but a few countries and gives India a distinct advantage in its industrial development. The land Relief Settlement in the Kullu Valley, central Himachal Pradesh, India. It is now generally accepted that India's geographic position, continental outline, and basic geologic structure resulted from the shifting of enormous, rigid, crustal slabs called tectonic plates. These plates, which form the entire surface layer of the Earth, collide or slip by one another as they move across the underlying layer of molten material. India forms the northwestern portion of the Indian-Australian Plate. Hundreds of millions of years ago, much of India's landmass was a fragment of an ancient southern-hemispheric supercontinent known as Gondwana, or Gondwanaland (which also included what are now South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica). With the shifting of tectonic plates, Gondwanaland began to break up, and the Indian fragment, carried by the Indian-Australian Plate, began to drift slowly northward toward the much larger Eurasian Plate. When they finally collided (approximately 50 million years ago), the northern edge of the Indian-Australian Plate was thrust under the Eurasian Plate at a low angle. The collision reduced the speed of the oncoming plate, but even today the underthrusting, or subduction, of the plate continues. The effects of the collision and continued subduction are numerous and extremely complicated. An important consequence, however, was the slicing off of crustal rock from the top of the underthrusting plate. These slices were thrown back onto the northern edge of the Indian landmass and came to form much of the Himalayan mountain system. The new mountainstogether with vast amounts of sediment eroded from themwere so heavy that the Indian-Australian Plate just south of the range was forced downward, creating a zone of crustal subsidence, or geosyncline. Continued rapid erosion of the Himalayas added to the sediment accumulation, which was subsequently carried by mountain streams to fill the geosyncline and cause it to sink more. India's present-day relief features have been superimposed on three basic structural units: the Himalayas in the north, the Deccan Plateau (or Deccan) in the south, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain (lying over the geosyncline) between the two. For a detailed discussion of the plate tectonic process and its role in the formation of the Indian subcontinent, see the article plate tectonics. Further information on the geology of India is found in Asia. The Himalayas The Himalayas (Sanskrit: hima, snow, and alaya, abode), the loftiest mountain system in the world, form the northern limit of India. This great, geologically young mountain arc is about 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometres) long, stretching from the peak of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan-held Jammu and Kashmir to the Namcha Barwa peak in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Between these extremes the mountains fall across India, southern Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. The width of the system varies between 125 and 250 miles. Birch trees in the western Himalayas in eastern Jammu and Kashmir. Within India the Himalayas are divided into three longitudinal belts, called the Outer, Lesser, and Great Himalayas. At each extremity there is a great bend in the system's alignment, from which a number of lower mountain ranges and hills spread out. Those in the west lie wholly within Pakistan and Afghanistan, while those to the east straddle India's border with Myanmar (Burma). North of the Himalayas are the Plateau of Tibet and various Trans-Himalayan ranges, only a small part of which, in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, are within the territorial limits of India. Because of the continued underthrusting of the Indian peninsula against the Eurasian Plate, the Himalayas and the associated eastern ranges remain tectonically active. As a result, the mountains are still rising, and earthquakesoften accompanied by landslidesare common. The relatively high frequency and wide distribution of earthquakes have generated controversies around several hydroelectric and irrigation projects. Despite the tectonic instability, the Himalayas, with their sacred peaks, occupy a major place in the life and culture of India. The people Ethnic composition Hindu pilgrims bathing and washing at a ghat (stairway) on the Phalgu River in Gaya, Bihar, While humans have probably occupied portions of India for several hundred thousand years, the racial stocks of the earliest inhabitants, as well as the time and place of their arrival, are not known with certainty. There is considerable debate, for example, over the racial affinities of those who lived in the great urban culture of the Indus Civilization (c. 26002000 BC). It was long held that a number of groups, most notably the so-called Aryans, came in successive waves during the decline of this civilization, but more recently even that theory has been questioned because of a lack of convincing archaeological evidence. What is generally accepted, however, is that an early Aryan civilizationdominated by peoples with linguistic affinities to peoples in Iran and Europecame to occupy northwestern and then north-central India over a period from roughly 2000 to 1500 BC and subsequently spread southwestward and eastward at the expense of other indigenous groups. This process was attended by considerable miscegenation, despite caste restrictions; and arguably it is still continuing, although not without considerable opposition from peoples whose own distinctive civilizations had also evolved in early historical times. Among the documented invasions that added significantly to the Indian ethnic mix are those of Persians, Scythians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, and Afghans. The last and politically most successful of the great invasionsnamely, that from Europevastly altered Indian culture but had relatively little impact on India's ethnic composition. The population of present-day India thus includes a number of ethnic groupsdescended from several different ancient racial stocksthat collectively have come to be called the Indian, or Indic, geographic race. This designation is based primarily on biochemical means (e.g., blood types) rather than on external physical attributes (skin colour among Indians, for example, ranges from fair to very dark). Within the larger whole, groups maintaining a certain degree of breeding isolation (e.g., the Dravidian-speaking peoples) constitute local races and microraces. Broadly speaking, the peoples of north-central and northwestern India tend to have affinities with European and Indo-European peoples from southern Europe, the Caucasus region, and Southwest and Central Asia. In northeastern India, West Bengal (to a lesser degree), the higher reaches of the western Himalayan region, and Ladakh (in the state of Jammu and Kashmir), much of the population more closely resembles Asiatic peoples to the north and eastnotably Tibetans and Burmans. Many tribal groups in the Chota Nagpur Plateau (northeastern peninsular India), whom ethnographers formerly described as Australoid, have affinities to such groups as the Mon, who have long been established in mainland Southeast Asia. Much less numerous are southern groups who appear to be descended, at least in part, either from peoples of East African origin (some of whom settled in historical times on India's western coast) or from a population commonly designated as Negrito, now represented by numerous small and widely dispersed peoples from the Andaman Islands, the Philippines, New Guinea, and other areas. Linguistic composition Two language families, the Indo-European (also called Indo-Aryan) and the Dravidian, identified somewhat simplistically with the Aryan and Dravidian ethnic groups, account for nearly all of the total population of India. Several other language families, principally the Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan, spoken mainly by tribal peoples of northeastern India, account for the remainder. Of the originally 14 (subsequently 18) languages recognized as official in the Indian constitution, 13 are Indo-European (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu), 4 are Dravidian (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu), and 1 is Sino-Tibetan (Manipuri). These languages have become increasingly standardized since independence because of improved education and the influence of mass media.