Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Capitalism needs commas

The newspapers are full of advertisments carrying the third-quarter results of listed Indian companies.  I've noticed that most of them have very large numbers for their sales, and other data.  However, almost every Indian company in its advertisment has not bothered to put a comma separator after every three digits.  Imagine reading the sales of Q3 as 123456 lakh, the corresponding quarter as 112233 lakh and the nine months as 345678 lakh. 

First of all, with such big numbers, why doesn't corporate Indian use crore, rather than lakh.  Wouldn't it be more useful to read this as 1234.56 crore or 3456.78 crore.  Heck, drop the two digits after the decimal that represent the lakh. 

Next peeve, why can't these companies simply turn on the comma button on their excel spreadsheets and relable this as 1,234.56 crore rather 1234.56 crore. 

Finally, in India, we use lakh and crore.  A crore is a hundred lakh.  I find it strange that some companies who use the comma, use it wrongly.  They say Rs. 123,456.  That's bizarre.  Shouldn't they say Rs. 1,234,56 lakh to make it clear that the last two digits separate from the crore.

Simply put, capitalism is about big numbers.  Big numbers need commas to make them stand out.  Even if India doesn't follow the univeral millions and billions, shouldn't it at least get its commas right?