India voted in the largest general election ever held in the world, a mammoth exercise in democracy that lasted about six weeks. The results will finally be announced on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is running for a rare third term in power, facing an alliance of opposition parties seeking to unseat him.
A Modi victory would be the first time a leader has won three consecutive elections since India's first prime minister did so in 1962.
Population: Home to more than 1.4 billion people, around 969 million were eligible to vote, more than the populations of North America and the European Union combined.
This means that around 12% of the world's population had the right to vote.
About 642 million people cast votes in the election, according to Rajiv Kumar, India's chief election commissioner.
The number of women registered to vote increased by 40 million since the previous election in 2019, and more than 20 million voters between 18 and 29 years old joined the electorate.
How the election worked: Indians voted for 543 seats in the lower house of parliament.
The party that wins the majority will appoint one of its winning candidates as prime minister and form a ruling government.
Voting began on April 19 and ended on June 1. The count, however, is carried out on a single day, June 4.
Some states only had one day to vote, while the country's most populous northern state, Uttar Pradesh, and the eastern states of Bihar and West Bengal, with a combined estimated population of 475 million, voted over seven days.
How people voted: From the high peaks of the Himalayas to the remote forests of India's central states, votes were cast electronically at more than 1 million polling stations in the country, a 1.2% increase in the number of polling stations over the previous election.
This operation required around 15 million election officials and security personnel during the elections, and some of these election workers traveled by road, boat, camel, train and helicopters to reach the citizens of India.
