Newspaper readership in India has grown during the past year, but magazine readership is down. TV viewing is up, and Internet growth has begun to slow down. That's according to the National Readership
Survey, which involved 284,373 house-to-house interviews in 7,000 cities and towns and covered 535 publications. Supported by a $2.8 billion ad industry, the survey says Indian daily papers grew while
fighting threats from the electronic media. With 203.6 million readers, 18 dailies crossed the 5 million mark--just one of them in English,
Times of India at 7.4 million. But suffering acute
poaching of marketing and editorial talent by newcomers, such as
Daily News, it dipped from ninth place last year to No. 11. The biggest surprise was a relatively small rise in Internet usage,
with users growing from 7.2 million to 9.4 million, and Internet homes moving from 1.3 million to 1.5 million. The survey "seems to have underestimated Internet-users growth in India," says Vijay
Mukhi, president of the Internet Users Club of India. "The more accurate number would be double of last year, about 14 million."
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