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jmilica
I don't doubt that there are many highly cultured people in India and many avid readers. Neither do I doubt that there are many places where you can get books. There are more than a billion people living there, after all.
I also know plenty of young and well educated people from India and they are most certainly as keen on modern time wasters like the internet and mobile phones as their counterparts in the West.
All the same, the figures don't add up. It is quite irrelevant if there are 1 million, 100 million or a billion people living in a country if you are looking at the average time spent by people on reading. What's not irrelevant is 40% of the population being illiterate. This means that the rest would - on average - have to be prodigious readers to achieve those high figures. How likely is that? Additionally, do you seriously believe that the people who do a lot of reading are those who are living in shacks with no modern conveniences? Reading is a decidedly middle class occupation the world over.
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