India's Online Revolution

Learning India’s online population is skyrocketing. Shwetank Dixit looks at the problems and opportunities this presents.

- Shwetank Dixit

As well as being the world’s largest democracy, India has both the world’s fastest growing economy and markets for online content. According to Internet Live Stats, India has more than 462 million internet users at present, which is about 13.5 percent of the global internet population. The overwhelming majority of them are on mobile, with leading sites like Facebook, Reddit, Quora and so on featuring India as one of their top countries in terms of usage.

People might think that 462 million is a lot, but that’s only about 34 percent of India’s population. That leaves a whole lot of room for growth. According to Akamai, by 2020 India will have around 730 million internet users, with 75 percent of growth coming from rural areas, mostly on mobile. Since the penetration of English is low in these areas, the opportunities for content and online services in regional languages is immense.

This is interesting because while India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, the growth of the web in India has so far mostly relied on English content. However, the next wave of new users will probably come from places where people are more comfortable in their own regional dialects. It will be fascinating to see how companies in India finally embrace localisation in terms of their user interface – something they haven’t done so much thus far.

India and other developing countries (like Indonesia and many African countries) adopted proxy browsers at a much more rapid pace than other countries. This is largely due to most of these countries’ slow data plans. Proxy browsers sped things up by offering compression of data. Since data was compressed, they also paid less for browsing the same web page compared to a standard browser. This mattered a lot when you were supposed to pay per KB or MB as these browsers sometimes compress traffic by up to 90 percent.

PROXY BROWSERS