> much more limited vocabulary
These days in my generation (Gen-Z) more youth watch movies and television series in English. Yet I find many of my more urbanized peers roll their eyes when I use a figure of speech i.e a metaphor.
In contrast, I picked up my language from technical books, blogs and documentation - and they sometimes find my choices of wording rather rude and insensitive.
I think I had to be more conscious about picking up the language because I did my early schooling in local language, and picked up reading English books on my own. For them it was natural in an urban environment. However, the urban english is "just enough" to get by. Since it is the "bureacratic" language (Indian schools too are as bureacratic as it can get), they had to be polite and standardized.
> However, as I understand, higher education is all conducted in English...
That english is way more limited, and higher education is way more mechanical than you folks have in the west.
> Is English language literature not widely read in school?
It depends on the quality of the education. I had the lower tier schooling (government-funded and similar). The English included is just rote-learned rather than understood - in high school we were expected to produce approximately same sentences as given in the textbooks, and any creativity in answers might lose grades!
There are better boards (school systems) like CBSE and ICSE, which are expensive and higher level. I have a few friends from ICSE who have much wider vocabulary than me. In the next generation, you will see Indians with better language skills, since most elite Indians now flock to these schooling systems.