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By Philip Whiteside, international news reporter

The world's largest democratic elections are due to take place over the next two months.

They are so large and involve so many people that they have to be carried out in seven phases.

As many as 879 million Indians are expected to vote, using more than one million polling stations.

Many of the 543 constituencies have more than a million voters each.

Some 11 million election officials will be employed to make the process go according to plan - but it is a complex operation to ensure there are no irregularities.

While dozens of parties are taking part, most support one of two leaders of the main parties.

Narendra Modi

The incumbent Narendra Modi heads the Hindu nationalist BJP, which says it is pro-business, pro-liberalisation and is socially conservative.

Many critics say its policies come at the expense of other religions - especially Islam - and those who benefit from India's system of subsidies, like farmers.

Rahul Gandhi

The challenger, Rahul Gandhi, as head of the Congress Party, is the scion of the dynasty which headed India for most of the decades after partition. Its broadly secular, socially democratic manifesto has been attacked by Mr Modi as being unworkable and unpatriotic.

The prize is the chance to lead a country that was once, under the Mughals, the richest empire in the world - a nation that many experts say has the chance to rise up once again to take its place at the top table of world affairs.

Initial results are expected on 23 May.

Here are 12 reasons why the election matters.

India is nuclear armed

When India carried out its first nuclear weapons test in 1967, it joined a select group of countries which could threaten to wreak mass destruction on enemies at the launch of a missile.

Despite never making any official statements about the size of its arsenal, the Federation of American Scientists has estimated India has between 130 and 140 warheads - enough to kill potentially tens of millions of people.

Although none are thought to be currently deployed, India possesses the intercontinental ballistic missile technology to fire one up to 5,000 miles on its Agni-V rockets.

It is also believed to have air-launched warhead capacity.

It has a "no first use" policy, which is not shared by its enemy and nuclear-armed neighbour Pakistan. Neither nations are signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It controls territory at the heart of one of the world's longest-running conflicts

Kashmir came under the administration of India after partition in 1947. Pakistan claims that because Kashmir has a Muslim majority, the former princely state should belong to it.

The two countries have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir - the last one of which left India with much less territory than it had after the two countries were split by partition.

Since then, thousands more have died as the Indian government has attempted to maintain its authority over a land where many people either want to join Pakistan or become independent.

In 1948, the UN mandated that the solution to the argument over the future of Kashmir should be solved with a referendum, but one has never been held.

The two countries are separated not by an official border but by a "line of control" which regularly sees spats between the two sides.

The territory is back at the centre of India's politics after 40 soldiers were killed by a terrorist bomb attack which India says was assisted by Pakistan.

India claimed it killed a large number of militants when it carried out reprisal air attacks over Pakistani territory, but Pakistan claimed there were virtually no casualties.

India is predicted to be the world's third-biggest economy by 2030

India had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world in 2018, according to the IMF.

The nation had real growth rates of 7.3% - far outpacing the UK's 1.3% - and this momentum is set to continue into 2019.

Estimates from the IMF suggest India will overtake the UK as the world's fifth-largest economy this year. From here, India is expected to match Germany in the late 2020s.

Meanwhile, HSBC anticipates India will surpass Germany and Japan as the world's third-largest economy by 2030 - leaving the country nipping at the heels of China and the US.

Whoever is at the helm will be key to the speed at which India's economic renaissance continues.

It is the world's third-biggest polluter

Currently, only China and the US produce more carbon dioxide than India. But like China, it has seen the amount of CO2 it produces rise substantially over the past few decades.

Carbon emissions are anticipated to fall in Europe - but in India, despite growing investment in plentiful supplies of renewable energy, emissions by 2030 are anticipated to be up to 160% higher than levels were in 2012.

A scientific study in 2017 found India was already overtaking China as the world's largest emitter of sulphur dioxide.

Both are the world's two largest consumers of coal, and in the last two years, pollution in Delhi has been so bad that it forced schools across the city to shut.

In some areas, air quality has been so poor that it is beyond the maximum PM2.5 reading of 999 - a level equal to smoking 50 cigarettes a day.

India is in a space race

Narendra Modi has described India as a space power after the country shot down a satellite in low earth orbit.

India claimed impact from the ground-launched missile would result in any debris from its own orbiting technology falling to earth - but several scientists, including those from NASA, have claimed the strike put other space equipment in grave danger.

NASA said the blast created 300 pieces of debris that put the International Space Station and other satellites at risk. Experts said India's move to create an anti-satellite weapon was prompted by China doing the same in 2007.

As well as China, Russia and the US have also shot down satellites. Mr Modi said: "India has made an unprecedented achievement today. India registered its name as a space power."

India has had a space programme for years, sending a low-cost probe to Mars in 2014 and providing cheaper launch alternatives to Western space services.

It plans its first manned space mission by 2022. Security experts said India's move shows "space is being turned into a battlefront".

It is the world's second-most populous country

India's population is up to 1.365 billion, according to UN estimates - nearly a fifth of the world's people. Its population went up by 27 people a minute in 2018.

While India's rate of population growth is slowing down, it is expected to overtake China as the world's most-populous nation in 2020, according to Population Pyramid, which uses UN data.

As its population grows, the pressures that go along with looking after a large population will increase.

Its people already live cheek by jowl in probably the most densely populated large country in the world - rivalling the Netherlands for the number of people living per square kilometre.

As competition for land increases, the pressure on the environment and for food resources will rise.

India is not an easy place to be a woman

Last year, the Thomson-Reuters Foundation ranked India as the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman.

Exactly how dangerous was exposed in 2012 when a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus - hitting headlines around the world and sparking international condemnation.

Despite large-scale protests at the time and ongoing activism since, things have not improved.

Much of the problem stems from the economic inequality that Indian women face.

India is the seventh-lowest ranked country for women's economic participation and opportunity, according to the World Economic Forum.

This manifests itself with a culture that prefers males: child sex ratios - which imply sex-selection abortions - are as high as 1.3 males to every female in parts of the country, according to the 2011 census.

Indian authorities have made some progress, introducing education programmes and fast-track courts for rape cases. But the ability of victims to get justice is likely to be hampered by endemic police corruption, with Transparency International putting the proportion of Indians paying a bribe to police in 2012-13 at more than 60%.

It is a Commonwealth country and potential free trade partner

As a member of the Commonwealth, India has close ties to the UK, originating from when it was part of the British Empire.

Narendra Modi became the first Indian premier in nine years to attend a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in London last year, when he met the Queen.

But, possibly because of the past, ties between the UK and its former colony have at times not been as warm as might be expected.

During his visit, Mr Modi pushed for an increase in the number of student visas issued to Indians to study at British universities. But a couple of months later, the UK attracted controversy by excluding India from a fast-track visa system for students from "low-risk" countries.

In the past few years, the UK has seen India as an important potential partner in a post-Brexit world, and hoped for a trade deal. Commentators have warned it will require concessions on immigration.

Fake news is rife

As well as being the world's largest democracy, India is also home to one of the largest numbers of people on the internet.

It has a booming tech sector in Bangalore - and the combination of a hugely significant election, highly trained coders and an avid audience has resulted in a flood of false social media memes, posts, and news items all vying to influence the outcome.

Facebook was recently forced to take down hundreds of misleading pages and accounts associated with both main parties and it has also removed more than 100 fake pages and accounts controlled by the Pakistan military, according to The New York Times.

But the social media giants - who have hundreds of millions of customers in India - are said to be struggling to cope, with many bogus posts or fake news stories written in India's 22 official languages.

Indian expats, including those in the UK, live around the globe

The nearly two million people of Indian origin who live in the UK are just a fraction of the 31 million who have made their home outside the subcontinent.

While a large number of Indians provide essential labour for Gulf states, and help keep the world's oil flowing, millions of others are highly economically important - taking the kinds of jobs that have wide-ranging impact around the world.

Forbes says there are 106 billionaires from India - more than anywhere other than China, the US or Germany. Google, Microsoft, Mastercard and several FTSE companies have chief executives who were born in India.

But another reason millions of Indians move abroad for work is a lack of optimism about employment opportunities in their own country.

According to Pew Research, 67% of Indians feel that job opportunities have worsened over the past five years.

Currently, India has a much lower emigration rate than the rest of the world - 1%, compared with the world average of 3%. In 2015, one in 20 migrants around the world was from India, and Pew Research says this number is increasing.

It is strategically located

Jutting out into the Indian Ocean, India sits midway between the Arabian Peninsula, Horn of Africa and the Malay Peninsula.

Its tentacles extend far into the Indian Ocean because of its island territories, such as the Andaman Islands.

Consequently, it dominates an ocean where 22% of international maritime container traffic passes through annually, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

It is not just India's southern borders which flank some of the world's most important trade routes. It almost surrounds the landlocked countries of Nepal and Bhutan. It also surrounds the part of Bangladesh that does not have a shoreline - and as well as Pakistan, it abuts China, with which relations remain frosty after a war in the 1960s.

As China continues to flex its muscles all around eastern hemisphere, pressure had been growing on India's armed forces to expand, with increasing calls to reform a naval partnership with Japan, Australia and the US to counter China's operation of its base in Djibouti.

It is prone to natural disasters, but does not have a strong record of dealing with them

Located between the tropics and the Himalayas and in the path of the annual monsoons, India is subject to all kinds of potential natural disasters.

Cyclones, floods and droughts regularly plague its different regions. Climate change is only likely to make its weather more inhospitable.

Last year, violent dust storms killed 125 people and left the energy network ruined.

August 2018 saw hundreds more die and a million people lose their homes in floods in Kerala.

But the country is also prone to man-made disasters due to a lack of authority and regulation.

Last year, three people died when a bridge collapsed in Kolkata - and dozens have died at several festivals as a result of stampedes.

While authorities respond, they are often criticised for the speed and effectiveness with which they act.

The severity of the floods in Kerala was blamed on high reservoir levels and poor warning systems and its after-effects were said to have been exacerbated by poor emergency planning.

From climate change to conflict, pollution to population, equality to the economy, the world is watching as India heads to the polls.