Telecom Statistics India-2020

As per the report, the teledensity in the country increased from 79.36 telephone connections per 100 inhabitants in 2015 to 93.27 connections in 2018. This number has since seen a decrease with 90.1 connections in 2019 and 88.66 connections in the year 2020.

In 2020, the total number of telephone subscribers in rural India was 521.26 million – as compared to 655.54 million in urban India.

There were 743.19 million internet subscribers in India in 2020, increasing by 106.46 subscribers since 2019. The number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants was 99.12 in urban areas and 32.24 in rural areas.

In the last two decades, the number of Public Call Offices (PCOs) in India decreased from 6.5 lakh in the year 2000 to 1.73 lakh in 2020. Similarly, between 2000-2020, Village Public Telephones (VPTs) decreased from 4.1 lakh to only 0.68 lakh.

There were 687.41 million broadband subscriptions in the country in the year 2020. With 58.31 million subscriptions, Maharashtra had the highest numbers of broadband subscriptions, followed by Andhra Pradesh (54.75 million) and eastern Uttar Pradesh (49.47 million).

At 5.65 million, Himachal Pradesh had the lowest number of broadband subscriptions among all service areas, followed by Jammu and Kashmir (7.13 million) and the North East (7.44 million).

The report states that the ‘traffic’ – minutes of use per subscriber per month – for GSM and CDMA forms of mobile network in 2020 was 750 minutes.

At the end of the financial year closing in March 2020, the total volume of internet data usage in the country was 23,403 million GB, out of which the 2G data usage was 153.71 million GB, 3G data usage was 798.32 million GB while 21,902.1 million GB of data was consumed through 4G networks.

As per data from Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the telecom sector made up 0.95 per cent of the total gross value added (GVA) for the year 2020.

In 2019-20, the service sector had the highest foreign direct investment equity inflows worth US$ 82,002.96 million. It was followed by the computer software and hardware sector (US$ 7,673.32 million), the trading sector (US$ 4,573.82 million) and the telecommunications sector (US$ 4,445.16 million).

The number of sim cards exported from India in the fiscal year 2019-20 was 415,749,202, making it the most exported telecom equipment that year. On the other hand, 245,110,611 sim cards were imported to the country in that period.

The report notes that developing countries reported a higher number of mobile cellular subscriptions (6,600 million) than developed countries (1,684 million) in the year 2019.

Focus and Factoids by Khushi Agrawal.