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India's Lost Clout

Venu's Thoughts Series: INDIA'S LOST CLOUT
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(Rather than being thought of as a single country, India deserves to be considered more like the European Union (of countries) - from a cultural diversity and population point of view).
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The nation of India was cobbled together by the British.
If each of the Indian states were be individual countries,

* 20 Indian states would be in the top 100 countries by population
* 19 Indian states would be bigger by population than Switzerland or Israel
* 18 Indian states would be bigger by population than Greece, Portugal,
       Czech republic or Cuba
* 17 Indian states would be bigger by population than Australia, Taiwan,
        Syria, North Korea, Romania or Netherlands
* 16 Indian states would be bigger by population than Afghanistan
* 14 Indian states would be bigger by population than Malaysia, Saudi Arabia
       or Venezuela
* 11 Indian states would be bigger by population than Canada, Iraq, Poland,
       Argentina, or Algeria
* 10 Indian states would be bigger by population than Italy, South Africa,
        South Korea, Colombia, Spain or Ukraine
*  8 Indian states would be bigger by population than France and U.K.
*  5 Indian states would be bigger by population than Germany, Iran or Turkey
*  1 Indian state  would be bigger by population than Russia, Japan or Mexico

(Is it true that India often gets the same vote clout in the U.N. as countries
with less than 1% of its population ??)

INDIA'S LOST CULTURAL/LANGUAGE DIVERSITY:

Counting the native speakers of different languages(note: these are languages,
not dialects of one language) in the world, we find that:

* 14 Indian languages are present in the list of top 50 languages of the world
*  7 Indian languages are present in the  in the list of top 25 languages
      of the world
*  3 Indian languages are present in the  in the list of top 10 languages
      of the world
*  7 Indian languages are spoken by more people than Italian
*  4 Indian languages are spoken by more people than French
*  3 Indian languages are spoken by more people than German
*  2 Indian languages are spoken by more people than Russian or Japanese

(hmmm.. how many of these languages show up in multi-lingual support in software?)
(Are Indians oblivious to their own rights of reasonable representation on the world stage?)

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Data Sources:  I derived the info above by combining data from the following
wikipedia pages (2014/04/06) into a spreadsheet (the Combined Population/Language Data spreadsheet is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_3MGp3kGSOAcmQ3R1ljZ0dDS0E/edit?usp=sharing):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_territories_of_India_by_population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers


Venu P Gopal


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