India went from 15% to 70% Internet access in a decade, mostly through mobile phones

In 2018, my colleague Max Roser wrote an article titled “The Internet’s history has just begun”. His point was that while the Internet had already changed the world, large changes lay ahead because billions of people weren’t using it yet.

In this chart, I revisit that observation using more recent data from India, the world’s most populous country.

When Max wrote his article, roughly one in five people in India were online. The chart shows that since then, adoption has grown much faster than in the decades before. Today, more than 70% of India’s population is online — close to the global average.

When you look at related trends in the adoption of communication technologies, you see that much of the sudden acceleration in growth after 2018 was driven by mobile phones.

Mobile phone subscriptions in India took off in the early 2000s and had already reached 75 per 100 people by 2015. Internet access accelerated through its mobile networks, which were made affordable by new technologies and market competition — including a major market disruption, which started in 2016 when a new low-cost entrant drove down prices.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “India went from 15% to 70% Internet access in a decade, mostly through mobile phones” by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.