Statsguru: From email to ecommerce, 25 years of internet in India

The Internet has completed 25 years of existence in India. There was a time when political parties opposed the use of computers to save jobs. Today, the internet is an important part of daily human life. Internet and tech companies may add 100 million jobs — new and transformed — in the next decade in India, according to a report by McKinsey.

In 1995, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd gave the first internet connection in India, and soon a sprawling network of cybercafes sprung up. A few years later, telecom companies started offering wireless data. Small-time ventures like Facebook became global tech giants, and India became home to the cheapest internet in the world. Chart 1 gives a timeline of India’s internet evolution.

In the last few years, the telecom revolution helped internet data consumption grow massively. The recent tariff war resulted in more mobile data usage. At nearly 12 GB per person per month currently, an average Indian is expected to double this over the next five years, shows chart 2. Further, the youth in rural India would be a key driver of this growth, reveals chart 3.

Chart 4 compares mobile broadband with fixed-line broadband. While the former is ubiquitous now, the latter has not grown very significantly. Fixed broadband subscribers remained stagnant between 2014 and 2018, shows chart 4. Similarly, though data in India is cheap, it eats up a larger part of a person’s monthly income, as compared to the cheapest relative cost in the world. Also, a report by Nielsen finds that only a handful of users access the internet through desktops or laptops, or desk-based machines.

But if data access “by the user” was the primary way data was consumed in the world in the past, users and devices “generate” more data than probably they consume now. Chart 5 shows that the data centre industry is worth $1 billion now, which will only get stronger in the future. And if India plans its policies well, the downturn in manufacturing can potentially be reversed with investments in research, incubation and production of the Internet of Things devices industry, as visible in chart 6.

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