300 Million New Internet Users in India by 2020, 1/2 From Rural Areas

As many as 300 million Indian consumers expected to be online by 2020, more than half from rural communities, making rural users nearly half of all Indian Internet users in 2020.

By 2020, rural Internet users will make up 48 percent of all connected consumers in India, researchers at BCG argue.

Rural Internet users are today almost exclusively male (98 percent). In cities, men represent 79 percent of customers.

More than 60 percent of rural users have been online for less than two years.

Almost 70 percent of rural users access social networks. Also, people in rural areas use social networks to access the Internet, which is where their consumption of content—such as news and videos—primarily occurs.

Primarily for reasons of cost and network availability, about 66 percent of rural users go online using feature phones, connected to 2G or sometimes 3G networks.

Perhaps 25 percent of rural  users have smartphones and only 10 percent use PCs or laptops.

In urban areas, by contrast, almost 66 percent of users own smartphones, and another 20 percent use PCs or laptops.

Rural users are more likely to use the UC web browser featuring data compression, which helps load Web content faster and reduce data consumption during browsing.

They tend to use apps such as SongsPK, which downloads songs for free, because streaming does not work well on 2G connections.

For messaging, many rural residents use Whatsapp. Alternatives such as Hi and Line are used more for video calls and exchanging files.

Vernacular media consumption apps such as Dailyhunt (formerly NewsHunt) and Dainik Jagran are more popular than English apps such as The Times of India.

In cities, Facebook is all about staying in touch with friends and making use of its social features, such as photo and video sharing, while in rural areas, it is often the only app on the phone and therefore the main way to access news and videos.

Rural users are much less likely than urban users to be interactive social media participants, who upload lots of content themselves.