Who is online, and who only nearly is

A subscription is not a connection, and a connection is not a usable one.

TRAI publishes subscription counts quarterly by telecom circle. On those numbers India is among the most connected countries on earth. The counts include every SIM, including the second one in a drawer.

Set against household survey data on who actually uses the internet, a familiar gap opens up: rural against urban, and men against women. That gap decides who can reach a government service that has moved online.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Broadband subscriptions	per 100 population	TRAIData year: 2026 (quarterly performance indicators)
Internet users, by sex	% of adults	NFHS-5Data year: 2019-21
Rural-urban usage gap	percentage points	NFHS-5 / TRAIData year: NFHS-5 2019-21; TRAI 2026
Villages with rural road access within 2 km	% of villages	PMGSYData year: 2026 (live)

What we publish

A circle-level dashboard that puts subscription counts and survey usage side by side.

The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.