First, “fluent” and “not recognizable by a specific speaker as having an accent different from his own” are very different levels.
And second, yeah, “I can’t distinguish their accent from mine” and “they don’t have an accent” are also different. You’ve got an accent too.
To a first approximation, Hindi /is/ Urdu.
Which reminds me, I was sitting in a training group when the Russian was translating for the Pole. I was interested: I didn’t know he spoke Polish. He gave me a look and said “maybe in Warsaw and Moscow they are different languages. In the country, on the border, they are the same language”
Anecdata: I lived with a Gujarati guy for a few months over a couple of stints. He is an employee of the parent company’s India office and I housed him while he visited our office a few times.
He would tell you that he spoke English fluently and he absolutely did not. He would struggle to communicate in English with lots of having to repeat himself. I made sure to be available when he was dealing with the general public to help him along. He would rapid fire gibberish with great confidence.
I would be dubious of any self-reported fluency poll. I think you’ll get a lot of people reporting themselves as fluent in English when they’re not, ruining the value of the poll numbers.
(Bolding mine).
There is no such thing as “little to no accent.” As Nava noted, everybody has an accent. You are erroneously equating “accents that sound like my own, and/or are really easy for me to understand” with “no accent.”
Well the only cites I could produce would be HR statistics of those 80k plus (possibly more, our current workforce in India is 80k, but doesn’t include those that were fired (or re-hired, so maybe a wash) who passed our fluency exam. Actually, it’s probably less than 80k because we have people on tech support who would have never taken our fluency exam.
About 10-12% pass our fluency test for speaking, meaning accent-less English. I forgot the number for written, but I believe it was higher. The percentage is higher if the call center is based near a university. Of the people I work with (site managers, directors, operations directors and VPs) I would say that their accent is much stronger (but good enough for some of our Clients to allow on their accent-less call centers) and correlates with education and wealth. The rest of my post is anecdotal.
Apologies, then, I am using an industry standard term as it relates to call centers.
Any degree of reading about or personal contact with people from Italy, Poland or Germany, maybe not a whirlwind tour with no reading about the country, would tell you English speaking ability also correlates with education and income in those countries. A relatively small (though relatively largest in Italy) tourism industry employs average or below average educated people at average or below average pay. But a larger trade/international oriented sector tends to require English and tends to pay more and employ better educated people than average. People in those countries who don’t retain the English they learned in school are generally less educated and less well paid than those who do.
This is if anything more obvious for India. Because the Indian economy spans such a wide range with a large numbers of absolutely poor (by world standards) subsistence farmers and menial workers, many of them among the ~1/4 of Indians who aren’t literate, and who have no reason to speak other than their local language. But the Indian economy also includes advanced sectors with some workers like those in similar developed world industries, and moreover Indian companies whose product is in part the English proficiency of their workers (‘call center’, ‘outsourcing’). Plus, English competes with Hindi as lingua franca within India but again that’s not as relevant to poor people. So English obviously correlates with education and income/wealth in India like it does basically everywhere else where it’s not people’s mother tongue.
Maybe caste was the hot button in the original statement. But I didn’t read it as saying caste is a separate predictor of English ability for people in India of a given income and education. Rather just that caste, education and job status correlate, so caste is also one of the things correlating to English ability. The original statement as a whole might have been in general too obvious to have to write, but not a ‘stereotype’.
As many of you have said upthread, I agree that fluency in English does have a strong correlation to education which in turn correlates income. English is the medium of instruction in the vast majority of private schools and these schools are not cheap by any stretch of imagination. Most of the other schools do teach English as a second language, but quite poorly.
I also wanted to point out that using the call center workers/applicants as a yardstick to measure fluency would not be quite correct. Call centers, like in other countries, are one of the lowest paid jobs in the tech sector and if you have a decent STEM related educational background (hence some degree of fluency in English as well), you would rather join the tech sector in other (and much better paying) capacities than in a call center.
Not apropos of nothing - the superfluous apostrophe in the thread title is quite ironic. 
Possibly especially ironic since English isn’t my first language either. 
Thanks for all the replies everyone. Appreciate it. FWIW, if anyone did watch the video, that channel (Asian Boss) is worth following.