[rmah]

While you are correct, those states are not small.

The number of native speakers for top five major languages as of 2001 are:

    Hindi (and dialects)  422 mil
    Bengali  83 mil
    Telugu   74 mil
    Marathi  72 mil
    Tamil    61 mil

These are not insignificant populations. If you add in Bengali speakers in Bangladesh, the total hits 189 mil.

It's easier to think of India the way you think of EU: an aggregation of peoples and cultures under a political umbrella. As an example, sure many people in germany speak english, but would you really try to seriously gain entry into the german market without localizing into german?

[yummyfajitas]

This is of course true. But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.

In Maharashtra, virtually every middle class person speaks English and Hindi in addition to Marathi. Auto drivers or street vendors will speak only Hindi and Marathi. Of the people I've encountered who don't speak Hindi, most were cooks/maids/similar.

A peripherally related question: is it worth translating your software into Dutch? 90% of the Netherlands speaks English and by having English you've also covered the UK. So it's probably not worth it.

Now lets compare the Netherlands to Maharashtra. The GDP of the Netherlands is $850B (16M people). The GDP of Maharashtra is about $400B (for 110M people). Half that GDP is just Mumbai (about 20M people) and Mumbai is disproportionately a place where English and Hindi work well.

If you are very forward thinking (10+ years), it might be worthwhile gambling that gaining a foothold in regional languages today might pay off when those regions grow. But that's a very long play.

[fractalb]

You may get by with Hindi in Maharashtra, but that's not true in southern states and the North-East

[yummyfajitas]

I get by with English and broken Hinglish in Pune and Mumbai. Those are the cities with internet and money. That wouldn't work so well in smaller cities, but those are also not the places I'd target if I were building a business.

As for the south, in my limited experience the same is true. English works fine in Bangalore if you restrict your conversations to upper middle class people with good internet and money to spend.

[erbdex]

> But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.

About a 100M people in India know English out of a population of 1.3 Billion. It is only the MNC service sector wherein know-english-have-money holds true. The larger chunk of India's income is generated by people who do not know English or Hindi(~800 Million people fall into this bucket).

[vertex-four]

And yet if you could enter Germany with the same marketing you give to the UK... wouldn't you?

There's a lot of markets which get left out when a company expands to "the EU" - which often means Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and maybe one or two other countries.