India was an early adopter of the Metric System among developing countries, in terms of official weights and measures.

India achieved a quick conversion from various regional and UK-heritage Imperial systems in use to a coherent one based on the International System of Units (SI) in the 1950’s. By 1962 all other “systems” of units were deprecated from official use.

This success in doing it with a “big bang” approach as opposed a gradual one was adopted by many African and Asian countries who also went through a similar exercise, usually at independence from colonial rulers or a significant event in their history.

Despite this early changeover, Indians persist in clinging to certain practices like measuring body temperatures, in informal settings, with a Fahrenheit thermometer, quoting human heights in feet/inches and pricing building areas/lot sizes in square feet and acres. Everything else seems to have switched over and well, particularly because the vast proportion of the population were not well educated and relied on a mish-mash of local systems of weights and measures while the elite had the equally mind-boggling Imperial stuff.

Weather - temperature in the past several decades has been in degrees Celsius almost completely. That’s the good part, but it doesn’t end there.

Indians have a lot of contact with the US for education, trade, immigration, tourism and the like. I find that most Indians with frequent or recurring contact with the US take to measuring temperatures in Fahrenheit and estimating distances in miles with ease. I looked into this dismaying trend through informal surveys with young and old people I meet and found a perverse elitism at play.

My conclusion is that Indians look up to US life and culture as aspirational and desirable and when they see Americans content in their miles, °F and ounces/gallons they see no reason not to apply their considerable numeracy in adopting, re-adopting for older folk, the “local” customs with glee.

I find this a confounding trend especially among the younger people who, as global denizens, should force us Americans to acknowledge the incoherence of our customary approach.

I still hold out hope that we Americans will see the light and move towards 95% of the world who have gone metric and chosen coherence over innumeracy.