Digital 2011: India

For today's instalment of our series of reports about social, digital and mobile use around Asia in late 2011, we're focusing on India.

In similar fashion to the numbers we saw in our China report a few days ago, India is witnessing dramatic growth in its digital community, with most of this growth driven by mobile.

Some of this report's highlights:

• Ownership of mobile phones in India is higher than ownership of TVs

• 31% of rural Indians have never heard of the Internet;

• 70% of India's internet users are male.

However, the big thing to note is that mobile phones are driving India's digital revolution - 59% of Indian internet users only access the web via mobile devices.

Excitingly, though, adoption trends suggest that more than 200 million new subscribers will join India's mobile legions this year alone - that's the equivalent of adding the entire population of Russia.

However, many of these users will still be using feature phones, and despite many people having access to data plans, the costs involved, combined with the speed of access, mean the internet experience for many Indians is still restrictive.

The good news is that, given the levels of interest and excitement in the country around the opportunities the internet is bringing to India, adoption and usage rates are set to continue their impressive growth for many years to come.

And, given that internet penetration is still only a paltry 8%, the sheer digital potential in India is amazing.

Check the rest of the juicy numbers in the SlideShare deck above, or click here to download a free PDF of the complete report (you may need to sign in to SlideShare first).

This article first appeared on the We Are Social blog.