National Readership Survey

The National Readership Studies Council, an autonomous body of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, recently released the National Readership Survey (NRS) for 2005. The survey covered about twenty-thousand respondents. It is believed to be the largest such survey in the world.

According to the survey, Indian literacy has gone up by 8 points to about 70%. What is interesting is the fact that of the 200mn readers, about half of them are from rural India. What is also interesting is that only 11mn people (less than 2% of the Indians) have access to the Internet. The survey indicates the growth of TV and Cable/Satellite particularly in KN, AP and TN. One can estimate that on an average an urban adult, sleeping 8hrs/day, spends a little less than 25% of his time per week reading paper (4.9hrs/week), watching TV (11.8hrs/week) and listenining to radio (10hrs/week). It dosen't come as a surprise that in a country with more than 40% of the population speaking Hindi, the Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar are the country's leading newspapers.

India's population is more than 1 billion and it continues to grow at 1.4%. But as the literacy growth rate is 21%, India will soon be a 100% literate country. Access to the Internet for all is not far from reality either. In Asia alone, the growth rate of Internet has been 150% in the last five years.