INTERNET IN INDIA
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India’s quarterly Performance Indicators Report is the most authoritative
source for assessing the march of the Internet in India.The latest report tells
us that India had 36.74 crore (367.48 million) Internet subscribers in
September 2016. Based on a population count of 127.7 crore, this translates to
28.77 Internet subscribers per 100 people.This is the ‘Internet penetration’
number that often gets cited in articles on digital India. But that’s a wrong
interpretation of these statistics.TRAI data captures the number of Internet
connections in India and not the number of households with Internet access.
What’s the big difference?
Well, if you live in an affluent
neighbourhood in a metro, just look around you. If you have a four-member
family (especially with teenagers), you are likely to own at least five
Internet connections – a broadband linked to your home computer and four 3G
plans on your family-owned smartphones. While you have a surfeit of Internet
‘access’, the driver of your car or the security guard at your apartment is
unlikely to have any. Instead of expensive broadband or 3G, they probably head
to a browsing centre if they need to.
This simple illustration tells you that
36.7 crore Internet subscriptions don’t equal 36.7 crore Indians connected to
the Internet. In fact, after doing away with such duplicate connections, it is
almost a certainty that 28% of India’s population isn’t connected to the
Internet. Depending on the number of connections hogged by the well-to-do city
folk, the actual proportion may be half or even one-third that number.To gauge
the true extent of Internet penetration, the question to ask is how many
households in India have at least one connection.The previous Census (2011) did
this and found that 77 lakh households of the total 2,467 lakh households had
it; that’s 3% of households. But then, the Census only asked people about whether
they had Internet connections on their computers/laptops.It did not find out
how many had Internet connections on their mobile phones, which is likely to be
a much bigger number. That gets us to the guesstimate that the actual Internet
penetration in India is somewhere between 3% and 28%. That’s a pretty wide
range.
The Internet connections that India does
have, are unevenly distributed too.TRAI data recognises that while urban India
has 61.9 Internet subscriptions per 100 people, rural India gets by with just
13.7.There’s also a yawning gap in connectivity between States depending on the
state of their network infrastructure and relative affluence. While the city of
Delhi alone boasts 2.2 crore Internet connections, the entire North East has
just 4.3 lakh. Mumbai alone hogs almost half of the 3 crore connections in
Maharashtra. In most States, urban areas account for two-thirds of the Internet
users.Many users are logged on to poor quality connections too, not allowing
for data-intensive applications. This is not just due to patchy networks
outside of the cities, but also because of the limited affordability of both
devices and Internet plans.
As per the TRAI report, of the 36.7
crore Internet subscribers, 17.5 crore (48%) are still on narrowband. That
means download speeds of less than 512 kbps. WiFi isn’t as ubiquitous as we
city folk think, with just 6 lakh connections across the country. While a
majority of users access the web on their phone, nearly half of the mobile
phone users (17 crore) are still on the snail-paced 2G. The average GSM
subscriber used just 236 MB of data in a month and spent Rs. 28 on it.Clearly,
for India’s digital divide to be bridged, network infrastructure outside the
cities needs to be significantly beefed up. The government is on the job, with
the ambitious Bharatnet project to digitally connect 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats.But
for India to truly go digital, phone makers and cellular operators will also
need to shift focus from their lucrative Wifi, iPhone and 4G customers, to
users who can barely afford Rs. 30 a month. Will they do it?
Prof. John Kurakar
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