India is estimated’, writes Professor Randolph Quirk in his Foreword—sometimes rendered as Forward in Indian English—to Braj Kachru’s The Indianization of English
to have over eighteen mil¬lion people using English as a necessary part of their daily working lives. This means that India vies with Canada as the country with the greatest number of English speakers after the USA and the UK.
Further, as Quirk points out
although eighteen million is only a small fraction of India’s vast population, it is of course a very impor¬tant fraction, inevitably comprising the entire leader¬ship of her economic, industrial, professional, poli¬tical and social life.