India's Internet economy to reach $250 bn by 2020

India's Internet economy is expected to reach $250 billion by 2020 thanks to rapid growth in mobile Internet users in the country.

E-commerce and financial services are projected to lead this growth. For instance, share of digital payment transactions could more than double to go up to 30–40% by 2020. Digital economy will have a much broader influence beyond the direct economic impact. Digital adoption will deliver several citizen-centric social benefits like enhancing ease of doing business, improving access to services and products and transforming governance.

According to BCG-TIE Report, the mobile internet users is expected to grow rapidly to 650 million mobile internet users by 2020 and high speed mobile internet adoption is set to reach 550 million users by 2020. Average data consumption is expected to reach 7-10 GB per user per month by 2020.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), along with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), today released a report titled 'The $250 Billion Digital Volcano: Dormant No More'

The report reveals that while so far mobile internet users have proliferated and smartphone users have gone up by 4 times, high speed internet users have still been limited only to around 56%.

Nimisha Jain, a BCG partner and report co-author said, "Firstly, by 2020, 4G enabled devices are expected to grow 6 times to 550 Mn devices, constituting 70% devices in use. Secondly, reliable high speed data is becoming both ubiquitous as well as mass affordable (data rates have reduced to less than one-third in just 4–5 months). Lastly, digital content is proliferating as well as improving in quality, thus driving consumption."

Moreover, the amount of video consumed online is on the rise especially driven by online media and entertainment. As internet access ceases to be a constraint, consumers will become more quality conscious, resulting in an increase in the average video resolution. Driven by these changes in online consumption, average data consumption per user is set to increase by 10-14 times by 2020.