> That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.)

> Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.

Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.