Indian Regional Language Internet Use

According to the Vernacular Report, 2012, of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), released, a higher percentage of rural people are aware of regional language content than urban users.

In India, 45 million users access content in the local language. Around 64 per cent of rural Internet users (24.3 million active users out of a total 38 million) use the Internet in the local language. But only 25 per cent of the total 84 million urban users browse the Net in regional languages (20.9 million).

By and large, the applications that are most used by regional language users include emails, search engines and news content, text chat, matrimonial services and online banking services. In rural areas, the report shows a bias in favour of sites offering government services, land records and private initiatives such as eChoupal, which provides aggregated information of interest to farmers and facilitates sale of farm produce.

Last March, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Sachin Pilot, speaking at a conference on mobile web initiatives, said the biggest challenge that would have to be addressed was the non-availability of online content in regional languages. According to the IAMAI report, Internet non-users have mentioned that lack of content in local language as one of the major reasons, along with lack of infrastructure.

With a low working knowledge of English in India (according to the National Readership Survey, 2006, only 18.2% of the population is English-literate; 34.2% in urban and 11.1% in rural areas), Internet penetration in India is only 12%, since content is primarily available in English.

The study covered the top metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Pune, and 12 smaller cities. Five non-metro towns and 10 small towns were also included in the study. It was conducted by the e-Technology group of the Indian Market Research Bureau and the IAMAI, an industry body representing the online and mobile industry in India.