<b>T N Ninan:</b> Trillion, or 10 kharab?

A modern economy with strong global linkages must switch to million, billion and so on. For the average India, efforts needed to make the mental adjustment and give up lakh, crore may not be a big ask

So how big is the Indian economy this year? If you were to put it in US dollars, the figure would be something approaching $2.5 trillion—which is easy to say and write. But if you were to put it in rupees, most people would say: about 160 lakh crore, or (rarely) Rs 1.6 crore crore. Numbers thus expressed are not only clumsy (like saying million million) but also, as a reader has pointed out, confound the logic of the Indian way of writing numbers. This is to have a comma after every two digits beyond the initial three, and different