The Hams - India

Our Vision for India
Our purpose for being in India is to simply do our part in delivering the Gospel to the unreached and making disciples of new Believers in accordance to God's perfect will.

In March 2007 we shifted from Mumbai (Bombay), where we spent our first three years in the nation, to a city 150 miles northeast of Delhi, in the lower ranges of the Himalayas and to the west of the Nepali border, where we minister from our home and seek creative ways to infiltrate the region's outlying villages.

Brief Description of India (more info on Wikipedia)
India houses a population of 1.1 billion people (2006), comprising approximately one-sixth of the world's population. This population is remarkably diverse; it has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented.

Although India occupies only 2.4% of the world's land area, it supports over 16% of the world's population. Currently it is the second most populous nation on earth, though if current trends persist, India will replace China as the most populous nation in less than 40 years. Almost 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years of age. More than 70% of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 200 towns and cities.

Over thousands of years of its history, India has had invasions and migrations from the Middle East, Central Asia and the West, as well as migrations from Tibet and southern China; Indian people and culture have absorbed and changed these influences to produce a remarkable racial and cultural synthesis. Religion, caste, and language are major determinants of social and political organization in India today. The government has recognized 22 languages as official; Hindi is the most widely spoken. India also has the largest number of English speakers in the world with over 350 million people speaking English in India.

Although 80.5% of the people are Hindus, India is also home to the second-largest Muslim population in the world (13.8%). India also contains the majority of the world's Zoroastrians (0.01%), Sikhs (1.94%) and Jains (0.40%). Other religious groups include Christians (2.3%), Buddhists (0.76%), Jews and Bahá'ís.

The caste system reflects Indian occupational and socio-religiously defined hierarchies. Traditionally, there are four broad categories of castes, including a category of outcastes, earlier called "untouchables" but now commonly referred to as "dalits." Within these broad categories there are thousands of castes and sub-castes, whose relative status varies from region to region. Despite economic modernization and laws countering discrimination against the lower end of the class structure, the caste system remains an important source of social identification for most Hindus and many non-Hindus as well, thus making it a potent factor in the political life of the country.