National Milk Day

Today I found a full page advertisement in The Hindu for the dairy company Amul.

It said, among other things, that “Today, 36 lakh dairy farmers of Amul are celebrating National Milk Day, the birth anniversary of Dr. V. Kurien, the Milkman of India, as we cherish the taste that lives in our meals, our memories, and our hearts”.

A lakh, for those who have never gone to India,

is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand”. According to Wikipedia, in “the Indian 2, 2, 3 convention of digit grouping, it is written as 1,00,000. For example, in India, 150,000 rupees becomes 1.5 lakh rupees, written as ₹1,50,000 or INR 1,50,000.

It is widely used both in official and other contexts in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is often used in Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan English.

A crore, on the other hand “denotes the quantity ten million and is equal to 100 lakh in the Indian numbering system”.

I also saw in same edition of The Hindu that Milma, the other main dairy producer in Kerala, has issued a range of new products to celebrate National Milk Day, so Amul have obviously not made it up.