Thursday, November 16, 2006

A Lakh Is a Lot

... and a crore is more!

Two words that I've encountered with a great deal of frequency - from headlines to TV news shows to everyday conversations.

"15 lakh estimated in air passengers this year" was a headline in today's newspaper.

A lakh is part of a numbering system ... it is 100,000.

So, 15 lakh is 15*100,000 ... or 1.5 million ... but it would be written numerically as 15,00,000 instead of 1,500,000.
And 30 lakh is 3 million ... which would more commonly be written out as 30,00,000 instead of 3,000,000.
It's the same amount of zeros ... just organized differently. How's that for "new math?"

A crore is one hundred lakhs ... which is ten million.

My head hurts.

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