It looks like Mumbai loves the Internet as much as it does street food, seeing as it plays house to the highest number of Internet users when pitted against any other metro in India. 16.4 million people living on this island city access the web, while the same reads at 12.15 million for Delhi.
Kolkata makes it to the third place after Mumbai and Delhi, but boasts of having just about half as many Internet users as compared to the nation’s capital. The figures come courtesy of the latest report from Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), a nonprofit industry body which has taken up promoting the digital economy as one of its main objectives.
Only last year, Mumbai and Delhi boasted of having 12 million and 8.1 million Internet users, respectively. Back then, Kolkata had 4.7 million of its citizens accessing the web. Bangalore has moved from 4.4 million connected residents in 2013, to 5.9 million of the same at present.
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Similarly, Chennai saw a jump from 4.5 million Internet users last year to 5.5 million in 2014. Even though Mumbai can lay claim to having such a high percentage of its population hooked on to the worldwide web, it was Delhi which registered the highest growth rate of adopters.
India’s capital proudly flaunted 50 percent year-on-year (y-o-y) increase in terms of Internet users and wasn’t closely followed by Mumbai with its much lesser y-o-y growth of 37 percent. Chennai is the city displaying the lowest number of new web audiences amounting to 24 percent.
Bangalore almost caught up to Mumbai with its 36 percent y-o-y growth rate. Kolkata and Ahmedabad tied at 33 percent each to grab the fifth place, just below Hyderabad and Pune with their 34 percent increase in web users. The top 4 metros collectively account for 23 percent Internet penetration in India.
Moving away from Mumbai, Delhi and the other large cities, Lucknow, Surat, Jaipur, Vadodara and Nagpur are named amongst the top five small metros with the highest number of Internet users.