Rural India takes to Internet with a vengeance

Kolkata: Digital adoption is fast becoming a way of life in rural India with an increase in usage of smartphones, with the total active inte...

Kolkata: Digital adoption is fast becoming a way of life in rural India with an increase in usage of smartphones, with the total active internet population likely to touch 900 million by 2025 from 622 million last year. This is a growth of 45 percent, according to a new report on Thursday.

Internet users grew by 4 percent in urban India — reaching 323 million users (67 percent of urban population) in 2020, while digital adoption continues be embraced in a big way in rural India, clocking 13 percent growth to 299 million internet users (31 percent of rural population) over the past year, according to The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) Kantar ‘ICUBE 2020’ report.

Mobiles continue to remain the device of choice for accessing internet in both urban and rural areas.

As mobile devices are so affordable along with the availability of cheaper data plans, accessing the Internet by a mobile device is clearly the first choice,

The report says that even though the internet penetration in urban areas is more than twice that of rural regions, the usership in rural areas has been growing at a faster rate on a year-to-year basis.

“By 2025, there would be a greater number of internet users in rural India than in urban India. The digital ecosystem will thus need to evolve to address the specific needs of this emerging demography,” said Biswapriya Bhattacharjee, executive vice-president, Insights Division, Kantar.

“Vernacular, voice and video will emerge as the game changers for the digital ecosystem over the next few years,” Bhattacharjee.

Nine out of 10 active internet users access the internet every day and on an average, they spend around 107 minutes (1.8 hours) actively on the internet daily, the findings showed.

Though the proportion of daily users is marginally higher in urban India as compared to rural India, the AIU (active internet user) in urban India is spending 17 per cent more time as compared to rural India.

Small towns account for almost two out of five active internet users while the top nine metros account for 33 percent of active internet users in urban India.

Of the 1,433 million population in India, 622 million are AIU, which translates to around 43 percent of the total population across urban and rural India.

“However, with a sizable population not accessing internet actively in rural India, there is huge headroom for growth in the next few years,” the report stated.

However, the proportion of male to female AIU remains almost the same in rural and urban India. In urban India, the ratio between male to female Internet users is around 57:43 while in rural India, the ratio between male to female Internet users is 58:42.