India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. Despite economic growth during recent decades, India continues to face socio-economic challenges. In 2011, 21% of India's population lived below the World Bank's international poverty line.
In a 2010 paper written for the Cape Town 2010 Congress of the Lausanne Movement, S. Kent Parks and John Scott deliver an impassioned plea for the “Forgotten Fourth” — the almost 2 billion people without access to the gospel.
These “separate peoples” are mostly Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist, and include significant urban populations. They have been described as unreached people groups, least-evangelized, least-reached peoples, and in what is possibly the most accurate and unsettling description of all, ignored peoples. Dr. (Ralph) Winter and others after him have tried to generate a global movement of the Church toward these peoples. Yet despite all the papers and discussions and conferences, today, 36 years later, this forgotten fourth without access to the gospel still makes up over 28% of the world’s population and 41% of the individuals in the world are members of a people group with no viable church.
