In India's internet story, one big shift is already well known - over the last decade, India has gone from having fewer than 100 million internet subscriptions to having over 900 million internet subscriptions.
India's National Sample Surveys - large, representative surveys conducted at the household level - point to a similar expansion of internet access; only 2% of homes in India had internet access in 2009, but by 2014, nearly three in ten homes had internet access and by 2023, about eight in ten households reported having access to the internet.
That mobile broadband has propelled India's internet revolution may be fairly well known, yet the scale of internet usage in India that is via mobile only came as a big surprise to me.
In the ten years from 2014 to 2024, India added 30 million wired internet connections, my colleague Abhishek Waghmare wrote in this piece on access to the internet in India. In the same time, India added nearly 900 million mobile broadband connections. The mobile phone is overwhelmingly how Indians get online.
What we're also seeing alongside this is very slow growth in the uptake of laptops/ computers. As of 2024, 97% of Indian households reported that they owned a mobile phone, while just 7% reported owning a laptop or computer (source: the 2023-24 Household Consumption Expenditure survey). In rural areas, just 2% of households reported that they owned a laptop or computer.
It's not just that very few own a laptop/ computer, very few know how to use one at all - more than eight in ten Indian adults now use mobile phones, but only two in ten reported that they can use computers, Abhishek found.
This, he writes, could have an impact on the information and communications technology (ICT) skills that Indians have. Over half of all adults can send a message, but only a quarter can send emails, just one in ten can use spreadsheets and just 1% report that they can write code.
The first big shift might have been to bring most Indians online, and that is in itself an important goal. But the devices they use to get online do matter too because they affect what we're able to do with the internet, and that could be the next big shift.
