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 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.
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