Number of internet users in India 2017-2023, by region

India’s digital adoption has been driven by the rural heartland of the country, registering a high growth of internet users compared to their urban counterparts. In 2023, there were 442 million internet users in rural India, accounting for more than half the country's netizens. 

Bridging the internet gap

This jump in rural internet penetration was largely owing to the increased availability of bandwidth, cheap data plans and various government initiatives under the Digital India campaign. As of 2022, over 181 thousand village and small-town councils, called Gram Panchayats, were equipped with internet access across India. Of these, Uttar Pradesh had the maximum connectivity in its rural areas with 38 thousand internet equipped gram panchayats. These factors also led to an overall spike in the internet penetration rates across the country. From just over 27 percent internet penetration rate in 2015, India reached almost 49 percent in 2022.

A perspective on the numbers

Although these figures seem relatively low, it indicated that about 692 million would be internet users by January 2023. This ranked India second in terms of active internet users across the world that same year.