Mumbai vs. Munich, By the Numbers
Last week I said I'd stop writing about "India" and "Germany" like each is one place with one answer, and start looking at actual states and cities instead. Here's the first real one: Maharashtra and Bavaria. Not the most extreme comparison available, but the two that come up most in questions from readers here, and both happen to sit near the top of their own countries' education rankings, which makes this a fair comparison instead of a cherry-picked one.
What Maharashtra's Numbers Actually Say
The closest thing to a real number for Maharashtra teenagers comes from a February 2025 study out of the Marathwada region, surveying college students specifically. It found 38.63% of female students and 38.71% of male students met the study's bar for financial literacy. Nearly identical between genders, which is worth sitting with, given how often the gender gap gets treated as the whole story here.
The same paper cites a separate, older statistic: over 80% of Indian women are financially illiterate nationally. That's a different population entirely (all adult women, not college students in one region), so I'm not stacking the two numbers on top of each other, and neither should you if you see them quoted together elsewhere.
Marathwada isn't Mumbai. That's a real limitation of this data, not a footnote to skip past. I couldn't find a Mumbai-specific or Maharashtra-statewide teen financial literacy survey anywhere, which tells you something on its own: even a state with 120+ million people and India's financial capital inside it doesn't have a clean, public number for how financially literate its own teenagers are.
What Bavaria's Numbers Actually Say
Bavaria has placed second on Germany's Bildungsmonitor education ranking behind Saxony for most of the last two decades, and it runs something almost no other German state has: the Wirtschaftsschule, a secondary school track built specifically around business and commercial subjects, starting as early as age twelve. A student on that track isn't picking up financial literacy as a side effect of a general curriculum. It is the curriculum, for two to four years.
Compare that to Saxony-Anhalt, sitting near the bottom of the same national ranking with no equivalent track. Two German states, same country, same currency, same federal banking system, and a teenager's actual financial education still depends heavily on which Land she happens to live in. That's the exact pattern last week's post described in Germany's education law. This is what it looks like in practice.
So What Does This Comparison Actually Show
Not that Bavaria beats Maharashtra, or the reverse. It shows that "India vs. Germany" was always a comparison of national averages sitting on top of enormous internal variation, and that internal variation might matter more than the national label ever did. A Wirtschaftsschule student in Munich and a commerce-stream student at a strong Mumbai school are probably closer to each other, in how deliberately their financial education was actually built, than either is to a random teenager elsewhere in their own country.
Which means the honest answer to "where do I fall on this" was never your passport. It's your state, your school track, and whether anyone taught you this on purpose.
Read Next
Related posts in this series: From Piggy Banks to UPI for the base India-vs-Germany numbers, How to Spot a UPI Scam for the practical side of digital literacy in India, and Which India? Which Germany? for why this state-by-state breakdown started in the first place.