Bharat Overtakes India In Adding New Internet Users For The Fourth Consecutive Year In 2024: IAMAI-Kantar

Rapid advancements in technology have helped in enabling more and more people to connect to the internet. A report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar, a marketing data and analytics company projected that the number of internet users in India will cross 900 million by 2025, with more internet users coming from rural India or ‘Bharat’

Bharat Drives Internet Penetration

In 2024, the number of internet users increased to 886 million rising 58 per cent compared to 821 million users in 2023. The growth seen in 2024 was driven by the rising number of rural internet users (Bharat) which surged to 488 million compared to urban internet users which increased to 397 million.

In percentage terms only 14 per cent of the internet users came from the top nine metros in India, the share of small metros stood at 9 per cent. On the other hand, small towns with less than a population of 10 lakh inhabitants made up 22 per cent of the total number of internet users and rural India comprised 55 per cent of the total internet users.

The total number of internet users has grown significantly from just 574 million in 2019 to 886 million in 2024. The data compiled by the report also indicated that since 2021, rural India has outpaced urban India in terms of total number of internet users. In 2021, the number of rural internet users stood at 351 million and the number of urban users stood at 341 million.

How India Uses The Internet

The report said that internet users across both rural and urban India spend an average of 90 minutes daily accessing the internet. Urban users spent relatively more time accessing the internet as the average screen time stood at 94 minutes. On the other hand, rural users accessed the internet for an average screen time of 89 minutes.

While the screen time for rural India seems to be lower compared to urban India, the report found that urban India lags behind Bharat in using the internet for content viewing, online communication and social media usage.

The report found that there are approximately 395 million OTT content viewers in rural India which is 58 million more users than urban India. As many as 335 million rural internet users use the web for online communication which is 40 million users more than urban India and in terms of social media usage, rural India has 347 million users which is 39 million more than urban India.