Lakh and crore

Indian amounts are written in units of 100,000 and 10,000,000. One lakh is 100,000. One crore is 100 lakh, which is 10,000,000. Indian call documents use them almost exclusively, and a European reader who substitutes millions silently makes a large error.

The digit grouping follows the same system and is the real trap. ₹1,50,00,000 is one crore fifty lakh (fifteen million), not one hundred and fifty million. The commas fall after the first three digits and then every two, so Western pattern-matching on the separators gives an answer that is out by a factor of ten.

Both units appear in the same document without warning: a scheme ceiling in lakh, a programme envelope in crore, an equipment line in plain rupees. Read the unit each time rather than assuming the document is internally consistent about it.

Bemzu stores every Indian amount as a plain number of rupees and lets the currency switcher restate it, so nothing in the corpus depends on parsing lakh and crore correctly at display time. When you open the source document, expect the original notation back.

The convention is not confined to funding. Indian financial reporting, company accounts and press coverage all use it, so the habit is worth acquiring by anyone working with Indian partners, budgets or market data at all.