Introducing the Indian Winter season
Updated on 20 January 2010
Channel 4 begins a special series of reports exploring the challenges facing India during its fast changing development.
So why are we doing the news from India?
Well it is all about getting a different perspective on the world, and exploring one of the most exciting and fast changing countries in the world. Over the next five days we will be exploring the big challenges as India develops.
Don't forget that through a global recession India's economy still grew at 7 per cent and the government says it will return to 9-10 per cent growth within a couple of years.
The new middle classes all want cars, TV, fridges and air conditioning. But, as Faisal Islam reports tonight, 500 million people here still don't have electricity at home.
They are all promised electricity within this decade - so how are they going to do it?
And with such reliance on coal how are they going to do it in a relatively clean way? We'll also be reporting on the threats to India: externally from Pakistan based militants as in the Mumbai attacks, and internally from Maoist rebels who have inspired a movement that is now active in several of India's states.
We have exclusives on both those stories which I will save for tomorrow to tell you more about.
We will also be exploring the social challenges India faces as it changes. More money, more independence for the young and more western influences are all having their impact.
Six months ago the High Court decriminalised gay sex - but it is being challenged in the Supreme Court. So I've been talking to gay men in India about what it is like to be homosexual in a socially conservative country like this that is also changing fast.
India is still essentially built around the family - and we heard how many gay men go along with the family pressure to get married and have children, and live their lives in secret, because of how hard it can be at work and home to live as an openly gay man.
The wealthy upper class urban types might be just like any other gay crowd in the western world, but where that leaves the ordinary middle classes is a tough one. The wider Delhi area alone has around 20 million people living in it - that means one to two million homosexuals depending on which of the commonly quoted ratios you believe. Either way, it is a lot of people.
More broadly we have also commissioned an exclusive survey from one of India's biggest social networking sites bharatstudent.com to ask people the little things too - such as who their heroes and role models are, where they would like to live if they had to emigrate and when they think India will be a real superpower.
And a crowd of media students in Bangalore will be uploading their instant opinions on the news of the day.
