India by the Numbers

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the areas I focus on is Indian language products and services. The basic thesis is this: India has a huge population of people who should be using the internet but are not. One of the primary barriers to usage is language: the internet is a fairly unfriendly place in India if you don't speak English. Let's try removing or lowering this barrier, and the internet becomes useful for a much larger group of people. I'll elaborate on each of these points in subsequent posts, but for now, let's look at some numbers* (you could quibble about some of these e.g. literacy numbers supplied by state governments may be inflated, but they are in range of the true number):

• Total population: 1.2 billion
• Total literate population: 650 million
• Total middle class population: 350 million
• Total newspaper readership: 200 million
• Total vernacular newspaper readership: 180 million (90% of total)
  
• Total English-speaking population: 80 million (self-identified as speaking as first- or second-language in the 2001 census)
• Total online population: 40 - 50 million

If you (quite reasonably) assume that pretty much everyone who is online in India today speaks English, then the low internet user base makes sense - it's more than a 50% penetration among English-speakers, and zero among the other 93% of the population.

We need to build the Indian language web. Who's in?


* (Sources: 2001 Indian Census and 2006 National Readership Survey)

Hello? Testing.. 1... 2... 3

Is this thing still on?

My last blog post (before this one) was exactly sixteen months ago! It's amazing how time flies. I blogged back in April of 2007 about our imminent move from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Well, the move happened, and my wife and I have been in Bangalore since May last year. What with getting used to a new city, a new job (Product Manager at Google), a new social life (or lack thereof), blogging took a back seat.

What's pretty neat is that in the time that I've been away, I've actually been working on many of the themes that I've blogged about: product innovation in developing countries. My focus during the last sixteen months has been on Google's Indic language strategy and figuring out how best to bridge the language barriers that make the internet so daunting for the vast majority of India's population.

I hope to pick up where I left off in May last year. Is it possible to resuscitate a blog after a year? I hope so. I'd like to revive this blog, share my thoughts and ideas, and get your feedback. In the meantime, take a look at some of the stuff Google is doing in India.

Shift Happens

Neat slideshow on technological and political shifts. It just won the "World's Best Presentation Contest" at SlideShare.

Survey of India's Consumer Market

McKinsey's Global Institute has just released a report on India's consumer market. There is an executive summary as well as the full report, available for free download (although you may need to register yourself to access these). The study projects the growth and changes in the composition of India's consumer markets from today through 2025. The highlights include the following projections about the market in 2025:

• India will be the fifth biggest consumer market. If India continues on its current high-growth path over the next two decades, income levels will triple, and India will climb from its position as the twelfth-largest consumer market today to become the world's fifth-largest consumer market by 2025.

• The middle class will increase tenfold. As Indian incomes rise, the shape of the country's income pyramid will also change dramatically. Over 291 million people will move from desperate poverty to a more sustainable life, and India's middle class will swell by more than ten times from its current size of 50 million to 583 million people.
  

• Marked shift away from basics towards discretionary spending. Indian spending patterns will evolve, with basic necessities such as food and apparel declining in relative importance and categories such as communications and health care growing rapidly.
  

The full report has a wealth of data that will be a useful reference for anyone interested in the Indian consumer market.

The 2007 e-Readiness Rankings

The Economist, along with IBM, has published this year's assessment of the state of information and communications technology in 70 different countries. The rankings, which have been published since 2000, measures a wide range of factors that collectively aim to measure the ability of a country to benefit from investments in information technology and communications infrastructure. The complete report is available here (it's free and you don't need a subscription to the Economist). It's an interesting read.

A couple of facts from the rankings:

• Denmark is the highest ranked, while the US and Sweden are tied for second place.
  
• The highest ranked developing countries are Estonia and Slovenia, at 28 and 29, respectively.
• Among the large developing countries, South Africa is the highest ranked at 35, followed by Turkey at 42 and Brazil at 43.
• Among the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, Brazil is the stand-out at 43. India, China and Russia are grouped more or less together at 54, 56 and 57 respectively.

The methodology used the generate the ranking is interesting and illustrative into what drives adoption of technology at a macro level. The rankings used the following six criteria, listed below along with their weight in the overall calculation:

• Consumer and business adoption (25%). Per capita spending on IT, levels of e-commerce activity.
• Connectivity and technological infrastructre (20%). Access, availability and cost of internet access.
• Business Environment (15%). General business climate, including political stability, taxation, labor policies and opennes to investment.
• Social and cultural environment. (15%). Literacy, training, and more generally, the "capacity" to ulitize the technology if it is available.
• Government policy and vision (15%). Government adoption of information technology, online procurement, public services online.
• Legal environment (10%). Ease of new business creation, intellectual property protection.

Interestingly, India ranks higher than China or Russia despite having a significantly poorer score for connectivity and infrastructure. It scores much higher in the legal environment and government policy and vision criteria, pushing up its overall rank.