How Much is That?

When traveling you always need to come to terms with a different currency. It usually means trying to translate the value of some amount currency in the host country back to the familiar home currency.

India uses the Rupee, which uses the attached symbol.  If that's not available, then "Rs" is also acceptable.

If your from Australia the conversion isn't that hard. Rs100 is about $1.70 after some exchange loss. (If your somewhere else you can work out the rate here.) 

A trip in an Auto Rickshaw to most places is going to cost Rs10 per person. ( Less than 20c Au) 

A reasonable main meal is Rs120 to Rs200. ($2 to $4 Au) cheap hotel room can be had for Rs1200 ($20). The car and driver for the trip to Diu cost Rs8900 for all 6 of us ($150). So a $ goes a long way.

If your talking to business people, like farmers and Agri-shop owners, they talk in larger values. I'm quite familiar with $K's and $M's. Here they talk about Lakh, which is Rs1,00,000. If you talk to big business they'd be talking about Crore, which is Rs10,00,000. 

You might have noticed that the comma's are placed after every second zero rather than every third. Except for the first three zeros.

The values aren't simply related to money. There was a festival nearby last night where it was expected that 5 "Lakh" people would turn up. 

If you want to talk about the weight of something, for example the size of a harvest, they'll talk about "Quintal's". 1 quintal is 100Kg.

If you ask how big the farm is, the answer will be in "Bigha's". One bigha is 0.25 of an acre. Or maybe it's 0.4 of an acre. After researching on the internet I'm not sure.

So what does it mean when a farmer say he can grow 2 quintals on each bigha and at market get 1 lakh for for a full crop?  (If that means something to you then we need you to join our team!)

#ibmcsc india