Indians saying no to English

I have never been able to understand why people of India did not take up French as their second language with a vengeance. Hindsight tells us pursuing English as the language of choice has helped India become the software power it claims to be. But given the fact that the English ruled us for over 190 years one would think that Indians as a whole would reject their language for their cultural rival – French. (This of course never happens; colonies almost always adopt their former masters’ cultural norms.)
But assuming Indians had decided to take up French, I can only imagine how much easy it would have been for us to speak the language. And it is not just because of the advantage of speaking the language since childhood. It is also because Devanagri script is very precise and more advanced than Roman script.
Let me take a few examples:
How do you think you should pronounce ‘Le’? Unless someone tells you how, you are unlikely to know exactly. Even after being told, I have heard people saying it incorrectly. But tell an Indian ‘Le’ => ल, and see them speaking effortlessly. Or tell them ‘les’ => ले and you get that perfect French pronunciation. Let’s take something a bit more difficult: ‘venez’. In Hindi, it would be written वने and you have an exact pronunciation key in your hand.