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At the end of July this year, it will be the 26and anniversary of the first phone call made to India. The first call was made in July 1995, when West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu in Kolkata held talks with Union Telecommunications Minister Sukh Ram in New Dehli.
Although this event was accompanied by a reasonable degree of fanfare at the time, in a sense the media coverage it received could not really fully appreciate the historic moment this marked event. And although the past two decades have been marked by a wave of technological change, there are perhaps few that have affected Indian society as profoundly as the proliferation of mobile phones at.
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Mobile phones are used for everything these days, from paying for utilities and making person-to-person payments, to researching online betting bonus codes when you relax after a hard day’s work. IN fact, there are few aspects of daily life in Indian society that we can think of that have not been impacted by the rise of the mobile phone!
To give you an idea of the depth of these changes, India is currently the second largest smartphone market in the world. Trailing just behind China, in 2019 India saw a staggering 158 million smartphone shipments. Other data seems to support this enthusiastic adoption of mobile technology. And according to a McKinsey Global Institute’s “Digital India” report, between 2014 and 2018, the number of smartphones per 100 people in India increased from 5.4 to 26.2.
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Usage statistics also seem to indicate the increasing presence of mobile technology in the life of the average Indian. And according to the McKinsey report, between 2014 and 2018, monthly data consumption among Indians increased from 86 megabytes to 8,320 megabytes. India is also one of the hottest markets for mobile app downloads, with 12.3 billion mobile apps downloaded in 2018, second only to China.
Recently published data reported that there were 1.10 billion unique mobile connections established in India in January 2021, representing a 2.1% increase from the previous year. This was equivalent to approximately 79.0% of the population. And while this figure doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with population, since it only records connections made by mobile devices, it does give a general idea of usage trends.
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Although you would be hard pressed to find an area of life where mobile apps are not used by Indians, it is perhaps our social life where the proliferation of mobile technology is most noticeable.
This is confirmed by recent usage statistics released by Ravi Shankar Prasad during a press conference announcing new social media rules. During the conference, Prasad revealed that WhatsApp is the most popular app, with around 53 crore users. Next is YouTube which has over 44.8 crores of users, Facebook and Instagram having 41 crore and 21 crore users respectively.
Perhaps most interesting about these numbers is that social media still has a lot of room to grow. Recent data suggests that there were around 448 million social media users in India in January 2021, which is around 32.3% of the total population.
That said, it is clear that mobile phones have profoundly impacted the lives of Indians. It remains to be seen exactly what the future holds for us!
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