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With One Foot In The Past And The Other In The Future, India Faces A Digital Paradox

As “second India” becomes more digital, they will inevitably begin to pay more attention to digital media.

Newspapers at a distribution center in New Delhi, India, on November 10, 2016. (Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg)
Newspapers at a distribution center in New Delhi, India, on November 10, 2016. (Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg)

(This article is a summary of a column published in TechCrunch)

Unlike the dramatic decline of the media in the west brought about by smartphones and the internet, the situation in India could not be more different. Freddie Dawson notes that a recent study from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry suggests the value of the Indian newspaper industry has in fact grown by two-thirds in the past six years, and, according to KPMG, is predicted to fluctuate comfortably between 12 and 14 percent for the next several years.

The contradictory growth of print media is a perfect example of the Indian digital paradox, an amazing phenomenon where India — a country of more than 1.2 billion people — is developing in a distinctly different manner than the west.

According to Freddie Dawson, growth in the Indian newspaper industry is primarily driven by the country’s rapidly expanding middle class and comparatively low internet penetration across the country.
A man reads a newspaper outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal in Mumbai, India, on October 5, 2016. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
A man reads a newspaper outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal in Mumbai, India, on October 5, 2016. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)

Unlike in the west, where the digital explosion put even the biggest, best-funded legacy publications on the back foot, media groups in India are developing side by side, passing each other like ships in the night.

India has the world’s third biggest smartphone market, and Indians are expected to buy roughly 139 million smartphones in 2016; however, the majority of these will not be iPhone 7s, but Android devices costing less than $150.

The availability of increasingly affordable new and used smartphones is opening the doors to potentially hundreds of “second India” digital media consumers over the next decade.

Rather than viewing this as a threat, Indian media companies have the luxury of viewing the slow move toward digital as a potential goldmine for which they have time to prepare.

Raghav Bahl is the co-founder and chairman of Quintillion Media, including BloombergQuint. He is the author of two books, viz ‘Superpower?: The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise’, and ‘Super Economies: America, India, China & The Future Of The World’.