The Net Spreads Wide

What consequences of the rapidly growing number of internet users in India?

For many years now, the spectacular growth of India’s information technology and business process outsourcing sectors has been driven almost entirely by foreign markets and customers across many time zones. They were, despite their double-digit growth claims, often criticised for being islands of the networked North in the digital darkness of the subcontinent. At the turn of the century, India had less than 10 million people connected to the world wide web; over the first decade of the 21st century it grew ten times to reach a hundred million. In less than three years since, the number of internet users in India has doubled and before this year is out, India will have the highest number in the world, after China.

It may well be that we are at the same point with regard to the internet, as we were with the mobile phone a decade back. In 2003 India’s mobile user base had just crossed the 10 million mark and the most optimistic projections suggested that there would be a 100 million mobile phone users by 2010. The actual number by that year was close to 800 million. For long the spectre of a debilitating digital divide had been the bane with India’s internet use limited to those with the incomes and skills to access computers costing tens of thousands of rupees. The government had often spoken about rolling out internet services and connecting villages and urban areas with high speed broadband. The ambitious plan of linking 2,50,000 of India’s villages with an optic fibre cable network remains largely unaccomplished. The broadband policy remains in tatters with broadband still defined at 512 kilobits per second (kbps) despite a decision taken last year to base it at four times that. Even in the largest of metropolitan centres in India, actual speed that users get is often abysmally low.

Interestingly, it appears that India’s internet expansion has piggybacked on the mobile phone and leapfrogged the wired internet. Behind this mixed metaphor lies a reality which shows that India’s citizens are reaching out to the world wide web with little help either from their government or from the internet service providers, who are not investing sufficiently to sustain this spread. Of the 204 million internet users recorded in October 2013, 110 million access the internet through their mobile phones. The availability of relatively inexpensive handsets with the ability to connect to the internet combined with the almost complete wireless phone coverage of the country is pushing internet use. What is most striking is that 68 million internet users are from rural areas, which have recorded a growth rate of over 50% in the last one year. Of these 25 million access the internet through mobile phones.

Other than mobile phones, the “cyber cafe” has been another important source of access to many people, perhaps playing the same role that the ubiquitous “PCO/STD/ISD” booths did in spreading telecommunications in the 1990s. The figures of internet usage, given out by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, indicate that it was only after the mobile use stabilised in 2010-11 did the shift to the internet start. Even now, internet use is defined in the most minimal terms and does not really imply an ability to access freely the information and communication capabilities of the medium. However, it does seem that the practical and cultural barrier to accessing the internet has been breached, maybe even the financial one. Perhaps, new government policies need to ride piggyback on the path cleared by the citizen-consumers themselves and use the existing mobile network to push internet use.

The shift from low teledensity to almost universal coverage was so swift that most observers and policymakers were left stranded with the conceptions and rhetoric of a bygone era. Something similar may well be happening with the internet. Given the rates at which the internet using population has grown and is projected to grow, it is now perhaps futile to talk of a digital divide in the terms we did even a couple of years back. That however does not mean that new divides, inequalities and barriers to access will not emerge. But to be able to identify them and work out strategies to address them will need us to be alive to the rapid pace of change, to the fact that the spread of the internet, combined with the mobile phone, is an extremely disruptive and transformational technology. Unfortunately, it appears that we are unable to recognise this revolution for what it is and thus remain unprepared to deal with either its dangers or its possibilities.