Internet to Spike India's GDP by 2015

Bangalore: The influence of internet on society and commerce in India is enormous, clear and continuously growing. As per a recent study by McKinsey & Co, the Internet has a potential to contribute $100 billion to India’s gross domestic product by 2015, which was nearly $30 billion in 2011, with its exponential growth. To measure the influence created by internet seems difficult, however it is visible and it is easy to measure indices like online sales.

The global consulting firm informed that the boost in India’s GDP through internet is because of the number of internet users that is expected to increase anywhere between 330 million and 370 million by 2015. It states that 28 percent of India’s population will be accessing the internet by 2015. The report said “India will add more Internet users than any country in the world over the next three years,” as reported by R. Jai Krishna for Wall Street Journal's India Real Time.

At present just about 10 percent of the population in India uses the internet, which is estimated as 120 million people. The McKinsey report projects India will overtake the U.S. by 2015 and become the country with second highest number of internet users after China.

Currently over 2 billion people use the internet, worldwide. The internet’s contribution to world economy in 2010 was $1.7 trillion, which is approximately the present size of India’s economy.

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