# How does India consume news? > The famous trust figure of 39% comes from a survey of online, English-speaking Indians. The India that reads Hindi papers, forwards videos and has never answered an English online poll looks rather different. **There are two Indias in the news numbers. Most people quote the smaller one.** Every June, a number does the rounds: 39% of Indians trust the news. It comes from the Reuters Digital News Report, and it describes only the connected, English-reading slice. The larger India reads news in Hindi and regional languages on paper, bumps into it in forwards and feeds, and is measured with awkward, unaudited, self-declared numbers that nobody quotes. Put the two Indias side by side, the mobile-first, WhatsApp-and-YouTube world of the surveyed online minority, and the vernacular print boom that the survey misses, and you begin to see how the country actually consumes news. ## Do Indians trust the news? Every June, one number makes the rounds: the share of Indians who say they trust the news. In 2026 it is 39%, ranking 18th of 48 markets, a touch above the global average of 37%, and the headlines write themselves. But look at who was actually asked. The Reuters Digital News Report surveys roughly 2,000 Indians who are online and answering in English, and it says so itself, in the small print, every single year. That group is younger, richer, more urban and more male than the country. So 39% is not how much India trusts the news. It is how much a particular, connected slice trusts it. The line has moved modestly from 38% in 2021 to 39% now, but the more important number is the millions of Hindi and vernacular news readers the survey never reaches. ## How the connected slice gets its news Inside that online slice, news no longer arrives on a front page. Among surveyed online Indians, YouTube leads at about 58% in 2026, used for news in the last week. WhatsApp jumped nearly 10 points in a single year to about 56%, and Instagram has climbed fast to around 45%. Facebook sits lower at roughly 39%, and Telegram at 23%. These are platforms where news is encountered, not necessarily trusted. The shift is from newsrooms to video and chat apps. And tucked inside the 2025 round of the same survey, about 53% of these online Indians named WhatsApp as the channel carrying the biggest threat of false or misleading information, the highest figure of any market. Closed, forwarded, video-first channels are exactly the ones hardest to fact-check. ## The India that came online Before asking how India consumes digital news, consider how recently and how fast it got online at all. In December 2008, India had just 5.45 million broadband subscribers. Cheap 4G arrived, and the curve turned almost vertical. By April 2026, the total crossed 1,073 million. But these are subscriptions, not unique people; one person can hold several SIMs, and one phone can carry a work line and a data line. The number overstates the count of unique internet users, but it tells a clear story: India came online late, and it came online on mobile, in a rush. ## Who can actually use the internet The official, nationally representative survey from MoSPI gives the honest anchor. In 2025, about 86% of all households had internet access, but the ability to use it splits hard. Urban men top the chart at about 86%, while rural women sit at only about 58%. Rural men (72%) and urban women (74%) fall in between. That near-28-point gap between an urban man and a rural woman is the divide an English online panel cannot see. These numbers are from a door-to-door survey that sampled the whole country, not a self-selected web panel. They remind us that access and ability are not the same thing, and the internet is still not a universal news source in India. ## Town and country, online The urban-rural split shows in the subscription numbers too. At the end of March 2025, TRAI reported about 111 internet subscriptions per 100 people in cities, against about 45 in rural areas. The all-India average is about 69, hiding the split. Urban penetration can exceed 100 because many people carry more than one connection. Wireless accounts for about 96% of all internet subscriptions, confirming that India’s internet is overwhelmingly mobile. This is supply-side infrastructure, not a count of unique news readers, but it frames how unequally the connectivity that the online news survey assumes is actually spread across the country. ## Even online, TV and print are fading Inside the narrow slice the DNR surveys, the old media are losing weekly reach year on year. Weekly use of television for news fell from about 59% in 2021 to about 44% in 2026. Print dropped from about 50% to about 35%. This is a real change among online Indians, but it is not the national picture. Television and print still reach far more people across the whole country than the DNR sample captures, and they are fading more slowly in reality than in this survey. The DNR itself warns that it “will tend to under-represent the continued importance of traditional media such as TV and print.” ## The 2026 pecking order for news A single snapshot of the online slice in 2026 shows a clear hierarchy: YouTube (58%), WhatsApp (56%), Instagram (45%), Facebook (39%), and Telegram (23%). Video and chat apps lead, search is absent from this list, and newspaper websites barely register as platforms by themselves. This is not a trust ranking; it is a usage survey. It tells you where the connected minority goes to bump into news, and it shows that for them, the newsroom is now a feed. ## A phone-first newsroom For the surveyed online Indians, the news device is overwhelmingly the smartphone. The share using a smartphone for news has stayed high, moving from about 73% in 2021 to about 76% in the latest round. But this is not just a quirk of the online slice. The MoSPI national survey found that about 94% of internet users in India get online via mobile data, and about 59% of households own only a smartphone, without a computer or tablet. The phone-first habit is national, not a DNR artifact. For the farmer checking mandi prices, the young woman scrolling Instagram, and the office worker forwarding a news clip on WhatsApp, the newsroom fits in a pocket. ## The attention is moving to the feed News increasingly lives inside algorithm-driven feeds where overall time spent keeps climbing. Quarterly social media hours in India rose from about 103 billion in early 2022 to about 173 billion by late 2025, according to FICCI-EY estimates. These are not all news hours, but they are the pool in which news must now compete for attention. When a breaking story lands in a feed sandwiched between a cricket clip and a wedding reel, the old habit of picking up a newspaper or tuning in to the 9 p.m. bulletin becomes harder to sustain. ## AI just started eating the news audience A sharp new twist: the online news audience, measured by Comscore, shrank for the first time. It had risen to about 461 million in 2024, then fell about 9% to roughly 428 million in 2025, the first such drop. Industry stakeholders point to AI: search summaries and chat apps that answer questions without sending readers to news sites. Some publishers say their own reach fell by over 30%. This is a platform-reach measure, not a survey self-report, so it is its own signal. It suggests that even within the connected slice, the path from a question to a news article is growing longer, and sometimes it ends before a reader ever sees a byline. ## India’s print boom, and its recent slip While Western newspapers were collapsing, India’s newspaper circulation roughly doubled through the 2010s. Claimed daily circulation rose from about 258 million copies in 2008-09 to a peak near 450 million in the mid-2010s, then eased back to about 379 million by 2023-24. Hindi led the boom, surging from about 120 million to a high of roughly 230 million before settling at about 187 million. English was always a small slice, moving between roughly 43 million and 68 million, and is now shrinking to about 40 million. This arc is the unfamiliar opposite of the Western story, and it is a important counterweight to any narrative that print is dying. The figures are self-declared and unaudited; PRGI does not verify them. Read the broad shape, not the single-year numbers, and know that the Hindi heartland reads on paper far more than any online survey suggests. ## The news India actually reads on paper A single-year look at the language of claimed circulation, from the PRGI report for 2023-24, makes the point brutally. Hindi accounts for about 187 million copies a day; English, only about 40 million. Marathi follows at about 30 million, Urdu at about 27 million, Telugu at about 23 million, Gujarati at about 17 million, and Tamil at about 9 million. The language in which most Indians actually read the news is the one the English online survey misses. The numbers are self-declared and unaudited, but their scale is impossible to ignore. ## ...and the titles behind it The sheer count of registered periodicals tells the same story. In 2023-24, India had about 151,000 registered periodicals. Hindi accounted for about 58,600, English only about 20,200, followed by Marathi (11,052), Urdu (7,035), Telugu (6,473), Tamil (6,290), and Bengali (5,113). Registered titles are a cumulative stock, not all still publishing; only about 36,000, roughly a quarter, actually filed an annual return. But the ecosystem is unmistakably vernacular. The English-online survey captures the view from the smaller tower. ## Seeing news vs seeking news Even among those who are online, deliberately reading the news is rarer than stumbling into it. The IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE survey of 2024 found that, out of about 886 million active internet users, about 582 million, or two-thirds, encounter news online. But only about 180 million, just one in five, consciously seek it out. Most internet users bump into news in WhatsApp forwards, social feeds, and YouTube recommendations rather than opening a news app or visiting a newspaper website. Passive exposure is not the same as readership, and a large part of the online news audience is a fleeting, scroll-past audience. ## The internet’s centre of gravity moved to the village The online India of 2024 is more rural than the English-online survey implies. The ICUBE survey counted about 488 million active internet users in rural areas against about 397 million in urban India. The fastest-growing, most numerous part of online India now lives outside cities. And about 98% of these users consume content in Indian languages, not English. This rural, Indic-language internet is almost invisible to a survey fielded in English online, yet it is where the next wave of news consumption is being shaped. ## The year digital overtook television Industry revenue confirms where the money has moved. In 2024, digital media revenue overtook television for the first time: about ₹851 billion against television’s ₹679 billion. By 2025, digital had climbed past ₹1,100 billion while television slipped to about ₹617 billion. Print stayed roughly flat, hovering between ₹250 billion and ₹259 billion, though circulation revenue has fallen for two years running. Film recovered modestly to about ₹205 billion, and radio remained tiny, around ₹23 billion. Digital advertising reached about ₹947 billion in 2025, roughly 63% of all ad spend. This is advertiser and subscription money, not audience reach. Television still reaches far more Indians than digital, but the financial centre of gravity has shifted. ## Which brands the online slice trusts When the same online panel is asked about specific brands, a familiar pattern emerges. Legacy print mastheads and public broadcasters top the list: The Times of India at about 69%, Hindustan Times at 67%, All India Radio and Economic Times at 65%, BBC and Indian Express at 64%, DD India and The Hindu at 63%. Private television channels sit in the middle: NDTV at 62%, CNN-News18 and India Today TV at 61%, Republic TV at 57%. Digital-born outlets score lowest: The Wire at 51%, Scroll.in at 48%. A low trust score is ambiguous; it can mean a brand is genuinely distrusted, or that it reports critically on those in power and is actively disliked, sometimes amid coordinated pressure. The DNR explicitly warns that these scores are not a measure of journalistic quality. ## How should you read these numbers? There is no single, authoritative dataset on how India consumes news. This article is stitched together from whatever could be found: the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, an annual survey of roughly 2,000 online, mainly English-speaking Indians that is, by its own statement, not nationally representative; TRAI’s administrative telecom data, which counts subscriptions, not unique people; the MoSPI National Sample Survey on Telecom, a nationally representative anchor; the IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE internet-use survey; the PRGI ‘Press in India’ report with its self-declared, unaudited circulation; and the FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment report, which gives industry revenue, not reach. Each source looks at a different corner of the problem, and they do not always agree. Numbers that describe the online, English-speaking slice should never be read as the whole country. Circulation figures are self-declared and likely inflated. Revenue is not audience size. The honest picture is a mosaic, not a clean measurement. Read it as the best available, held together by the knowledge that the India of the famous survey is the smaller one. ## Sources - Reuters Institute Digital News Report (DNR): annual survey of roughly 2,000 online, mainly English-speaking Indians, explicitly not nationally representative. - TRAI: monthly telecom subscription reports; broadband subscriber counts are connections, not unique individuals. - MoSPI / NSS Comprehensive Modular Survey on Telecom 2025: nationally representative household survey on internet access and ability. - PRGI 'Press in India' report: registered periodical counts and self-declared, unaudited circulation figures; only a fraction of registered titles file annual returns. - FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment report: industry revenue estimates; revenue is not audience reach. - IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE: large-scale internet use survey; defines active internet users and news behaviour. - Comscore: digital audience measurement, platform-centric; figures via FICCI-EY report. --- Source: [This Indian Life](https://thisindianlife.today/articles/how-india-consumes-news/) · Updated 2026-06-20. 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