66% entertainment, 11.4% e-governance: How India's connected households divide their time online

Seventy-two percent of Indian households are now connected to the Internet, but the vast majority of that connectivity is focused on entertainment and social media rather than government services, financial access or education, according to a National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) survey of nearly 50,000 households, which found that how Indians get online and what they do when they’re online are two entirely separate issues.

Fun first, everything else second

The single most common internet use among connected Indian households is watching movies, TV programs and news at 66%. Social media follows with 53.8%, meaning roughly two-thirds of connected households primarily use their internet access for content consumption and social engagement.

Together, these two categories account for a dominant share of household Internet activity and are a significant distance behind all other usage categories in the data.

The findings come from NCAER’s report “The Evolving Landscape of Digital Inclusion in India”, drawn from the third wave of the Indian Human Development Survey covering 47,473 households and 212,607 individuals between 2022 and 2024. India’s internet user base has grown from around 198 million in 2015 to over 2.05 billion low-availability mobile phones by 1.03 billion data.

Mobile wallets beat the bank branch

The data captures a significant shift in how Indian households manage money online. While 40.8% of connected households use the internet to transfer money, utility bill payments through digital wallets such as Paytm and BHIM account for 11.7%, compared to just 4.4% for utility payments through internet banking.

E-governance: 11.4% problem

Despite sustained public investment in the Digital India programme, only 11.4% of connected households use the internet to access government services. The NCAER report found that digital technologies did not consistently translate into engagement in education, financial services or government portals.

A connected household is much more likely to open a streaming app than a citizen service portal, a gap that raises direct questions about the practical returns on India’s digital infrastructure spending.

Online learning: 16.1%

Online learning accounts for 16.1% of household internet activity, compared to 66% for entertainment, a ratio of roughly four to one. India has added around 830 million internet users in a decade mostly through cheap mobile data. The NCAER data shows the extent to which this expansion has served content consumption rather than education or skill development.

A billion users, 440 million still offline

India’s connectivity milestone parallels a parallel reality. While the country surpassed one billion internet users by October 2025, around 440 million people remained offline at the end of the year.

Almost 27.5% of Indian households have no access to the Internet at all, even though mobile phones have reached 95.1% of households. The gap between device ownership and meaningful connectivity is one of the more significant findings of the report. A cell phone in a household does not automatically create an internet-using household.

Gender distribution within the billion

The connected population skews heavily male. Only 35.6% of women use the internet compared to 57.6% of men, a gap that stretches across both urban and rural settings. The NCAER report sees this not as accidental, but as a structural limitation on the economic and social returns that connectivity can generate at scale.