What was the per capita ownership of two wheelers in India in the year 2011 ?

Concept: per capita ownership of any item is a plain ratio — the total number of those items divided by the total number of people. It carries no percentage sign: it is simply the number of items per person. Because it is a ratio of two counts, both counts must be expressed in the same unit before dividing, and Indian data tables mix two magnitudes: 1 lakh = 100,000 while 1 million = 1,000,000, so 1 million = 10 lakh.

Applying the concept to the year 2011:

1. Read the 2011 row of the table: two wheelers = 1018.65 lakh, population = 1210.19 million.

2. Bring both figures to the same unit — divide the vehicle figure by 10 to turn lakh into million: 1018.65 lakh = 101.865 million.

3. Divide the vehicles by the people: 101.865 million divided by 1210.19 million = 0.08417.

4. Round to three decimal places: the per capita ownership of two wheelers in 2011 was about 0.084 two wheelers per person.

Cross-check using absolute counts, with no unit shortcut at all: 1018.65 lakh = 101,865,000 vehicles and 1210.19 million = 1,210,190,000 people, and 101,865,000 divided by 1,210,190,000 = 0.0842. The same value appears, which confirms the lakh-to-million conversion step.

Two conversion slips each change the result by a factor of ten:

• Dividing 1018.65 by 1210.19 directly treats one lakh as one million and gives 0.84, ten times too large.

• Converting the vehicles to million (101.865) but the population to lakh (12101.9) applies the conversion twice and gives 0.0084, ten times too small.

A note on units: 0.084 two wheelers per person is the same as about 8.4 two wheelers per 100 people, that is 8.4 per cent — not 0.084 per cent. The choices as printed in the original 2017 paper carried a stray percentage symbol, which is a unit error; the numeric values themselves are the per-person ratios computed above.