“with the added advantage of being fluent in English”
Very few Indians are fluent in English.
HAHAHAHAH More Indians speak English than any other language, with the sole exception of Hindi. What’s more, English speakers in India outnumber those in all of western Europe, not counting the United Kingdom. And Indian English-speakers are more than twice the UK’s population.
These facts emerge from recently released census 2001 data on bilingualism and trilingualism in India. Indians’ linguistic prowess stood revealed with as many as 255 million speaking at least two languages and 87.5 million speaking three or more. In other words, about a quarter of the population speaks more than one language.
English was the primary language for barely 2.3 lakh Indians at the time of the census, more than 86 million listed it as their second language and another 39 million as their third language. This puts the number of English speakers in India at the time to more than 125 million.
The only language that had more speakers was Hindi with 551.4 million
“with the added advantage of being fluent in English”
Very few Indians are fluent in English.
As a percentage, I suppose it’s a low number, but so is the percentage of the more educated and upwardly mobile (almost all of whom would speak English) compared to the much greater number of impoverished non-English speakers in India.
But in total numbers India is #2 in English speakers (behind the U.S.), followed by Pakistan at #3. Those are the ones who mostly matter when it comes to competing with us, either in Spelling Bees or in anything else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population