New Delhi: India, officially called the Republic of India is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, the world's tenth-largest by nominal GDP and third-largest by purchasing power parity. These are the facts we all are aware of, but there are few facts and achievement by India and Indians which are rarely known by all of us, here we present a list of ten out of all, have a look: An asteroid almost caused a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in 2002. Fortunately it exploded over Mediterranean Sea. If it would have occurred at the same latitude a few hours earlier, the explosion might have resembled a nuclear detonation equivalent to the blast that destroyed Hiroshima. Navi Mumbai, a planned satellite township of Mumbai, was developed in 1972 and is the largest planned township on the planet. War of 27 years fought between the Maratha Empire and the Mughal Empire from 1681 to 1707 was the longest recorded military engagement in the history of India. Viswanathan Anand is first player in chess history to have won the World Championship in three different formats: knockout, tournament, and match. India is one of only 3 remaining countries in the world to have a horsed cavalry regiment. Agni III is the most accurate missile in the world in its range category and BrahMos is the fastest operational cruise missile in the world. The process of crystallization of sugar from sugarcane juice was discovered in India in the Gupta period (350 AD). There is an Asian brown cloud, a 2-mile-thick blanket of polluted air that covers much of South Asia that forms each year between January and March might be responsible for the premature deaths of a half-million people each year in India alone. Indians were not allowed to board the Palace on Wheels luxury train for quite a while since its launch on Republic day 1982 and its passengers were restricted to foreign nationals. The first ever fingerprint bureau in the world was started in Calcutta in the year 1897.
Updated on: March 02, 2013 6:50 IST
