In India, a million is ten lakh and ten million is one crore
Across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, big numbers are counted in lakhs and crores rather than millions. A lakh is one hundred thousand, written 1,00,000, and a crore is ten million, written 1,00,00,000. So 150,000 rupees becomes 1.5 lakh, and thirty million rupees is simply 3 crore.
Both this system and the international one are decimal, and they name the first five powers of ten the same way: one, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand. After that they part company. The international short scale coins a new name every third power, million, billion, trillion, while the Indian system names every second one: lakh, crore, then arab for 100 crore, followed by kharab, nil, padma, shankh and mahashankh, each a hundred times the last. Those higher names are rare in everyday speech, where people tend to stack the familiar ones instead, so a lakh crore stands for a trillion.
The written form mirrors the naming. Commas set off the first three digits left of the decimal point, just as in international usage, but after that they fall every two digits, matching quantities that climb in steps of a hundred. The decimal point is a full stop and the grouping mark a comma, as in English.
Older traditions reached much further. The ancient Indian system, still heard in regional languages, has single-word names for extraordinarily large powers of ten, and the epics describe their own numeration schemes, including one in the Valmiki Ramayana. Local variants grew up too: the Kumaon Kingdom measured farmland in a base-20 unit called the bisi, the area needed to sow 20 nalis of seed, so its real size shifted with soil quality. That system was the norm in Kumaon by 1891.
Official use is confined to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where it is universal and preferred. Sri Lanka and Nepal once used it but have recently switched to the international system, and the Maldives uses lakh in official papers while preferring millions for bigger amounts. English-language publications in India usually give rupee sums in lakhs and crores and foreign currencies in millions; the Reserve Bank of India, a rare holdout in 2015, followed that split across its website by 2024.
Source: Indian numbering system
