By Muhammad Luqman
India has 22% gap between urban and rural mobile phone ownership and trails behind other South Asian countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh , according to a study.
The urban-rural handset ownership divide in Bangladesh is 7%, while in Pakistan, it has gone down to mere 5% .
The statistics, however, presents a worrying state of affairs in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) domain and that too at a time when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much trumpeted Digital India program is entering into fifth-year.
“There is a 22% gap between urban and rural populations in mobile ownership, which is the largest gap among the Asian countries studied,” LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka-based pro-poor think tank in a statement Tuesday said.
The study pointed out that 55% are basic phones that have no Internet access, in addition to 16% feature phones and 28% smart phones that are being used in India currently.
The finding also revealed that 65% Indians between the 15 and 65 years of age group don’t even know about Internet, and a whopping 81% claim that they never used it.
India’s internet connections stood at 431.21 million in June, 2017 that includes 293.82 million in urban areas and 137.39 million in rural areas.
Internet penetration in India’s urban areas was 64.84% in December 2017 as compared to 60.6% a year earlier while rural Internet penetration has grown from 18% to 20.26% in December 2017, from December 2016.
The think tank’s findings were based on a survey of 38,005 households and individuals across 18 developing countries through a 90-minute long engagement.
