What do Yahoo! and Shammi Kapoor have in common? As it turns out, a lot more than that iconic shout in the Mohammed Rafi song ‘Chahe Koi Mujhe Junglee Kahe’ from Junglee (1961). The romantic hero was also an internet pioneer in the country back in the days, forming the first Internet Users Club of India, and going door to door in Mumbai demonstrating how the internet worked and how it could change our lives.
And if you were one of the early users of the internet back then, like Kapoor, it was literally impossible to avoid the first of the Big Techs—Yahoo! The Silicon Valley-based company may have lost its perch by now to the likes of Google and Meta, but in those glory days in the 1990s, Yahoo! was king—from its email to its salaciously addictive chat rooms where a thousand flowers of free-wheeling thought, speech and desires bloomed safe in the internet’s early promise of anonymity and no censorship. Yahoo! was everywhere, and not just in Kapoor’s lexicon.
The internet completed 30 years in India this year, and perhaps it is ironic, yet at the same time rather apt, that the milestone did not garner much attention. Ironic, considering the transformation it unleashed on the nation, and also pretty much in the scheme of things because of more or less the same reason—how universal it is now and how integral it has become to our daily lives. It seems like it has always been around.
In 2005, when the internet completed a decade in the country, THE WEEK ran a cover story, predicting that the usage ‘e-life’, then common terminology describing a lifestyle spending inordinately long hours online, would soon be called, just simply, life.
It is a prediction that came to pass, but the journey of the internet has been much more complex. As early adopter Osama Mansoor, who designed many of the initial news websites in India of the late 1990s and early 2000s puts it, “The digital space and scenario has evolved, morphed, exploded, imploded, opened up opportunities, restricted freedom of speech, instilled confidence in the ambitious (but) also stunted growth... [like with] online bullying.”
Like most other milestones in human innovation and achievement, the online space, too, has evolved with time. The modem crackle of the early-day dial-up connections has given way to an always-on smartphone.
From buying a flight or train ticket to paying your electricity bill or applying for a visa to finding a life partner, we use apps for many activities that previously involved either waiting (those from the era of booking trunk calls will nod) or going out to a brick-and-mortar establishment (buying groceries, food, medicines and at least in some Indian states, liquor, too).
The powers-that-be also took to this world running on ether with gusto—government services progressively becoming available online, to leaders and celebrities using the internet to take their message directly to the people. This did turn out to be a double-edged sword, with the premise of early-day pioneers of the internet that it will remain a bastion of free speech becoming the first of the net’s roadkills. Yes, we may still get a load of free porn, but in many nations, free speech is no longer guaranteed. Forget freedom, China’s ‘bamboo curtain’ keeps away, and under check, its one billion-plus populace in an ecosystem that is more or less home-grown—and home‘bound’.
Beyond personal liberties, that very premise of a censor-less internet soon got upended right on its head, with a scenario that today can make George Orwell wag his finger and say, “I told you so!” The surveillance state is very much a reality of our times, supercharged thanks to the internet—government entities are the biggest buyers of spy tools, and it does not even require sophisticated technology to track every comment citizens make or every website they visit, and even every keystroke.
AI and agentic AI would only make such measures even easier, and are already sending encryption and cybersecurity experts scurrying back to the drawing board. Forget India’s own struggles with getting data protection laws or those authoritarian states in west Asia or Africa, even the US, a country that proudly bills itself “the land of the free”, today checks personal social media activities as official state policy before granting certain types of visas.
Perhaps it is often a case of any real world matter having a yin and a yang, something good as well as bad coming out of it. The very democratisation of the internet has given everyone a platform to spread their version of truth to the world, which has turned it into a world of cacophony and belligerence.
While the jury is still out on this, the devastating after-effects are there for everyone to see—there is a reason we now call it the post-truth era. For India, the internet has equally been an empowering force as much as a repository of fake news that changes power equations. At its ugliest, it has caused mob lynching and loss of reputation leading to destruction of innocent lives. But on the flip side, the access to information, specially government services going online, has made lives easier—the India Stack of technologies for public service delivery is a poster boy of digital empowerment, the Covid-era vaccine drive being its most famous example.
For all its complexities, if one were to look back at how the internet transformed India, and the world, the perspective we get is one of change. Change unabashed, unvarnished and with all its warts. Change that has been amazingly good, but which also augurs disturbing possibilities as it hurtles down the highway of this post-truth information age. Sometimes the easier thing to do is to just take a joyride back down that highway, screaming at the top of your lungs, “Yahoo!” Getting a perspective of the road we have taken can give clarity on the road to be taken. Or not taken.
1 The internet comes to town
Ever heard of HEC-2M? Well, it is the first computer to be installed in India, British-made and installed at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata back in 1955 for data analysis. But the road from that to Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launching internet took more than three decades, slowly building up the computer buzz across the nation.
It started with closed networks, like those of banks setting up an inter-operational network for clearing cheques, to railways creating a digital, real-time pan-Indian ticket booking system. Then came NICNET that connected government entities for instant official communication via satellite, to ERNET, which interlinked top educational institutions like Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science and several IITs, giving them access to research updates and scholarly works.
VSNL, the sole authorised government entity with foreign connectivity, launched internet for the public on independence day in 1995, launching a dial-up service (via your phone and a modem, with local call charges applying on top of the internet fees) as well as leased lines (meant for commercial establishments).
2 Can you Yahoo!
Looking back, those early days of the internet appear deliciously vintage. Anyone who knew how to connect, open websites or even do chats or send an email was considered a tech wizard. Mansoor, who worked in the internet division of a leading media house in Delhi in the late 1990s, reminisced how leading journalists lined up in front of him, asking for help in opening an email account and chat!
The initial experience was almost purely American (some might say it has not changed even now), with Microsoft Windows the default operating system (Apple’s Mac and eWorld initiatives took their time), Netscape the smoother browser (which Microsoft’s Internet Explorer managed to kill off soon enough, not because of any superior quality but thanks to Microsoft’s software dominance), Hotmail the hottest email provider and Yahoo the giant you went to for everything else.
Yahoo ruled the roost, dominating anything from information (search engine), news, shopping (for those who dared to use their credit cards online to buy something prohibitively expensive from abroad, that is) and yes, its salacious chat rooms. In a world where talking to someone far away was a prohibitive long distance call away, chat rooms were nothing short of revolution. While it did connect near, far and dear ones, its bigger ‘contribution’ was helping strangers connect for anything they fancy, though the reputation the chatrooms got—right from its signature ASL acronym (age, sex, location; the first thing that was asked)—was seedy, and often downright creepy, as it was found to help paedophiliacs lure unsuspecting kids. Chatrooms died out by the 2010s, equally because of the distasteful reputation as much as the social media revolution that followed.
3 Hot‘male’
Chandigarh-born Sabeer Bhatia became one of the initial poster boys of the internet when he launched the internet’s first free email service Hotmail, which you could access from anywhere. Previously, email accounts were linked to your internet service provider’s (ISP) connection, which limited its accessibility. Bhatia, who had briefly worked in Apple, launched Hotmail as a web-based, rather than ISP-based, service, on American independence day in 1996, along with colleague Jack Smith.
Hotmail was the first revolutionary link in the internet’s ‘connecting people’ credentials (sorry, Nokia), coming after bulletin board services and ISP emails and ahead of the chat rooms, messengers, social media and WhatsApp. Bhatia became a star around the world, and his selling of Hotmail to Microsoft for some $400 million only added to his lure.
Hotmail’s own future wasn’t much of a happily-ever-after. Microsoft slowly killed off the branding, in favour of merging it into its own Outlook. In a way, the tragedy of early web email services like Hotmail, email.com and Imaginemail were the lack of a profitable business model—something which Gmail hit on later on by monetising the data in the emails.
4 Why not... till Y2K
Hotmail’s sell off for a mind-boggling figure led to the first internet gold rush, when everyone and their aunty bought up a domain name offering a plethora of services. Some were lucky enough to get some investors, while others were left floundering when sceptic journos asked them the question they dreaded, “What is your business model?”
How could one possibly announce that the only aim was to get their websites lapped up by biggies or those funding VCs looking for the next boom time story? From IndiaPlaza.com (e-commerce) to SeventyMM (movie rental), many of them now litter the graveyard that the dot-com boom to bust led to, though Indian IT companies did make hay while the Y2K scare shined at the turn of the millennium.
5 Cyber hub
Beyond offices where staffers were lucky enough to get net access, the initial introduction to the internet for most Indians right unto the 2010s were not through laptops or phones, but from those neighbourhood internet ‘cafes’ that sprang up all over. Cafe owners turned into educators, teaching anyone from that middle-aged guy looking to create an email id to a college student wanting to look up job vacancies.
From chats to porn to even hook-up spots (many internet centres in the hinterland started adding partitions between desktop machines to offer privacy), the internet cafes spawned their own counterculture that was quite the antidote to the rapidly increasing morality norms of the real world.
6 The truth about Satyam
The government unfastened its tight grip on internet service only in the late 1990s, when Satyam became the nation’s first private internet service provider. Sify, or Satyam Infoway, became a household name, and its promoter Ramalinga Raju became the poster boy of Indian entrepreneurs making it big in the exciting new internet economy. In media interviews, he spoke of operating across 50 countries and aiming for a staff strength of 50,000 and in investor pitches the company showed its financial strength in billion dollars, while in reality it was a fraction of that amount.
Things slowly unravelled after a botched real estate acquisition attempt, and Raju had to confess to accounting irregularities over years. Satyam was eventually purchased by Tech Mahindra, while Raju went to prison, later describing the accounting fraud he had to mount in the company to “riding a tiger not knowing how to get off without being eaten”. But hey, Raju survived and has got documentaries and OTT shows on his colourful life up on the internet.
7 You’ve got mail
Sachin Taparia of LocalCircles is a consumer rights activist who uses the internet for his mission, but his first brush with the new medium was a lot more earthy. Moving to the US for higher studies, he found a unique ‘click-and-mortar’ format initiated by India’s Postal Department, called e-Post, as a means of staying in touch with his grandparents in Bhopal.
It worked like this: he would send an email to e-Post, where staff will print out the letter, put it in an envelope and post it from the sorting office in Chennai to his grandparents in Bhopal. Their reply took the reverse route—they will write a letter and post it to Bharat Mail, where staff would scan and email to Taparia in Cincinnati.
“Instead of taking 15 days to come from America to India, the letter took only three days—basically the Chennai to Bhopal time,” he recounted, “So it was a great internet-provided way to stay in touch with your family for people who were abroad. Even with those who were not online, who did not how to use an email. That was the 1990s internet for me.”
8 Gatekeeper to the internet
While websites and browsers and the network backbone were all significant, one entrepreneur decided to translate his business domination of a crucial element in the internet ecosystem—that of the operating system software—into one that controlled everything else.
And for some time, Bill Gates and Microsoft managed exactly that, his shareholding in the Seattle company earning him the ‘richest man on earth’ title for the longest time. Intensely admired and even more intensely hated, Gates ensured nothing came in the way of the Windows dominance—including the Netscape browser being more popular than Internet Explorer, for example. Thousands thronged his public events when he visited New Delhi in March 1997, with politicians, celebrities and business leaders hanging on to his every word.
However, technology and regulations soon came in the way, and in what is fast becoming a recurring pattern in technology, a shift in trends—in this case from the computer to the mobile phone—signalled Microsoft’s fall from its lofty perch. Having reinvented itself in recent years under Satya Nadella, Microsoft is making a fresh play at hitting pole position online, primarily thanks to its early bets on OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT.
9 How smart is your phone?
The runaway leader in the initial years of mobile telephony was Nokia. The focus then was simple: sleek design, voice clarity, affordability, and with a lot of premium on size—the smaller, the better.
Nokia, to be fair, innovated constantly, from adding features like games, torch, cameras and even the internet, though the route it took was a duplication of the desktop computer access model, which was too cumbersome for phones. Enter the likes of BlackBerry and then, the iPhone with their apps ecosystem and focus on easy-to-use, internet-first mobiles, and everything changed. Phones went smart, with Nokia appearing not-so-smart and behind the curve.
10 Message in the medium
In the beginning was the word, and the word had to be typed out using an alphanumeric keyboard to be sent out as a message via SMS, or short messaging service, the first of the messaging apps on phones. However, as the internet got on to phones, the SMS became that poor older cousin nobody but telemarketers cared about as many new options sprang up.
The first to capture popular imagination was BBM, or the BlackBerry Messenger. In the mid-2000s, connecting via the closed BBM app became like being part of some elite members-only club. Apple then tied up with WhatsApp, an app already on its App Store for people to share their status. It became popular once it added a messaging component in 2009. Unlike BBM which could only be used on BlackBerry (until the company changed the restriction, by which time it was too late), WhatsApp worked on all phone interfaces, and it soon became the world’s most used messaging platform. It was snapped up by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
Of course, China refused to allow American platforms to operate in the mainland, resulting in its own unique apps, the market leader being WeChat in messaging.
11 Yug yug Jio
While the internet did grow leaps and bounds in the country, two factors limited its growth: the access device being a pricey computer, and the access language being primarily English. Despite internet cafes proliferating in the 2000s, the numbers were still small. In August 2005, internet users in India were still at less than four crore, and almost all of them in urban areas.
The turning point was when the nation’s richest man came in as a late entrant into the fiercely competitive telecom sector. To make his mark, his Reliance Jio shook up the market, offering nationwide coverage with free handsets and data packages costing next to nothing. Data charges in India crashed to some of the lowest in the world, with accessibility shooting up sharply. In one deft move, Ambani transformed forever two sectors with one price-cutting move: the internet and telephony converged and now seemed intertwined for life.
12 The phone supremacy
Running parallel to the fast spread of internet access was the new ‘iPhone snobbery’. Apple turned the smartphone from the utility into one of temptation and snob value. While the likes of Nokia did try the same with its gold-cased Vertu phones, iPhones had a combo of looks, snob value and great features, a formula Vertu could not replicate.
Today, it is not uncommon for people to sport phones costing a few lakh rupees, some limited edition or some with Louis Vuitton phone cases. The latest aspirational model is the trifold phone, launched by Samsung recently in Korea.
13 Dictatorship of the proletariat
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm as a place to compare the attractiveness of fellow college girls. The jury is still out on whether that would have been a more loftier objective than social media’s present day degeneration into a Tower of Babel, a cess pool where tempers run high, anger leads to real world disasters, fake news rules, and toxicity and social engineering permeate.
Orkut was the frontrunner when it came to social media, but Facebook stole its thunder and established itself as a behemoth by the late 2000s—giving pride and purpose to the internet at the right stage just when those heady early experiences of chatting with strangers, sending emails and getting news and videos were starting to get a wee bit impersonal. Social media showed the way forward: news and updates from people you know, people you care about, in a world where privacy was at a premium (and no one seemed to mind).
Later iterations included the news-and-views-in-a-capsule format of Twitter (rechristened as X), the dainty filter-filtered world of Instagram, and the likes of Snapchat—the pre-pubescent generation’s antidote to their parents, uncles and aunties getting on to FB and Insta. But the road ahead for social media is uncertain, with increasing reports of personal updates fast disappearing from sites, replaced with quick video content from creators that give addictive ‘dopamine’ rush to a ‘doomscrolling’ generation.
14 Broadband baje baaraat
While many of the early Indian entrepreneurial attempts at website building crashed with the dot-cum bust of the early 2000s, one uniquely Indian idea survived, and thrived. Matrimonial services made a smooth switch online, with sites like Shaadi.com, BharatMatrimony.com and M4Marry.com thriving. There are more than five crore registered users on such sites in India, with the online format catering to every caste, creed and such desi permutations and combinations. There is even one for seniors looking for a second innings in their silver years.
15 Atmanirbhar Bharat
India’s attempt at having desi equivalents to the most popular internet avenues is still a work in progress. Unlike China where international players were kept out leading to blooming of giants like Baidu (search), Alibaba (e-commerce), WeChat, Meituan (delivery) and Douyin (TikTok’s domestic version), Indian startups had an uneven playing field, thanks to American biggies like Google and Meta.
Yet, dextrous moves have helped some desi names to stand on their feet, like Flipkart (now majority owned by America’s Walmart), Rapido (cab hailing) Sharechat (Indian language social media). Koo was heralded as a desi alternative to Twitter but had to bow out because of financial pressures. The latest entrant is Zoho’s Arattai, which is aiming to disrupt the dominance of WhatsApp in the country in messaging.
16 Video Ga Ga
Among the many origin stories rolling around the internet about YouTube, perhaps the most interesting is the one that claims that co-founder Jawed Karim thought of a video sharing site after he could not easily locate a clip of pop star Janet Jackson’s infamous Nipplegate anywhere online. YouTube today is one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, with immense social and cultural impact, a veritable lodestar to our era.
However, the larger story of videos taking over from text is one of the defining trends over the past 10 to 15 years. Especially in India, where literacy in general and proficiency in English in particular were major stumbling blocks to early adoption, the arrival of Jio plus better broadband speeds that allowed video buffering meant a sudden spurt in internet usage.
While the massive popularity of the short video app TikTok was truncated by a government ban following Chinese incursions in Ladakh, TikTok’s loss soon became Instagram’s gain, as the Meta-owned platform which started life as a photo-sharing site soon pivoted to hosting Reels. More Indian person-hours are today spent on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts (YouTube’s own vertical format short video feature) than anywhere, online or offline. That in itself is a worrisome story for another time.
17 The age of the influencer
The utter democratising effect of the internet is most seen at the rise of the content creator as a bona fide job profile. On the face of it, the business model is mighty simple—making Instagram posts and Reels and videos for YouTube makes you an ‘influencer’, and in the word itself lies its immense monetising potential: influencers build up their following and once it crosses a threshold, marketers pay them to promote products, services and the like.
It has spawned stars who are today as recognised as matinee idols, with personalities like CarryMinati and Bhuvan Bam becoming household names. Some have even branched out into movie careers. At the same time, it is a contentious job category which many elders worry youngsters are needlessly getting enamoured with. Because, while at the top tier, an influencer in India gets paid in lakhs for every post, reaching there is a path strewn with stress and mental health hazards, say experts.
18 Click and wait
Internet going mobile has taken to digital a plethora of services. While the most famous are food delivery apps like Zomato and ride hailing apps like Uber and Rapido, there are a multitude of others catering to every whim and fetish: Zepto (10 minute delivery of groceries), MyGate (apartment gatekeeping), MilkBasket (morning milk delivery), U Drive (hiring a temporary driver), KaamwaliJobs (domestic help for hire), Tinder (for relationships) and of course Urban Company, which sends to your home anyone from a plumber to a masseur.
Unlike the dot-com rush more than two decades ago which saw a similar rush, at least the top players this time around are well-funded and are raking in the moolah. Zomato, for example, has expanded into quick deliveries (BlinkIt), becoming the market leader in the segment, as well as events and dining out (District). Its revenue last year was above Rs20,000 crore.
19 Re-velation
The internet has taken over recycling and reselling which were originally community-driven. From Ebay to desi alternatives like OLX/Quikr to local initiatives like Let’s Deklutter, the online space has given avenues which may not have been possible within the physical world limits.
Straddling between the two has been tech companies like Cashify, which buys second-hand phones. Explained co-founder Nakul Kumar: “The internet didn’t just organise India’s second-hand market, it changed how people perceived value.... It also connected all the missing pieces of this category like discovery, diagnostics, payments logistics and warranties.”
Referring to his own category, he added: “Earlier, a phone meant visiting a local shop; today, people can complete their entire journey from their sofa.... Transparent pricing, verified quality and easy doorstep services removed the old stigma and made upgrading feel natural.”
20 Show me the money
As everyone tried to figure out how to make money, one popular offline mode offered the way online. During the pandemic, as the markets boomed, young and old sitting at home during the lockdowns started dabbling in stock trading thanks to a plethora of DIY apps like Groww and Upstox, which made investing seem as natural as ordering a pizza (well, almost). This turned the likes of Zerodha promoter Nikhil Kamat multi crorepati (though he seems to be gaining more eyeballs these days from his podcasts), but the proof of the pudding was in the slice of the pie, which individual users of these platforms also gained on the bull run.
21 Banking on the machine
Way back in 1998, ICICI Bank became the first Indian bank to go digital, when it launched its Infinity service which offered the option to conduct many bank transactions via the internet. It took its own time. Innumerable are the urban legends of early netizens who bought something online with their credit card and then quickly called the card company to cancel the card, for fear of misuse.
But today, processes that made us take half day leave from work can be done within a few minutes over lap or mobile—the trust and transformation has been that rapid.
“What once involved multiple counters, forms and in-person verification now happens through platforms that put the entire bank in a customer’s palm,” said Bhavnish Lathia, CTO of Kotak Mahindra Bank. “Besides convenience, going digital is creating stable and personalised experiences that keep the bank accessible anytime, anywhere.”
22 The phone as the wallet
Banks had gone online, but they were still not a replacement for currency. Mobile operators like Airtel to mobile wallet companies like Paytm tried making money mobile with varied results, but the one that went universal was, surprisingly, a government initiative—the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of the RBI body National Payments Corporation of India.
“Digital banking in India has evolved dramatically over the past few decades, and UPI has become one of the most significant milestones in that transformation,” said Bhavnish Lathia.
UPI is not even a decade old, and last month Indians made more than 2,000 crore transactions over UPI platforms, worth a whopping 26 lakh crore. Now India wants to take the UPI globally, with it already being present in some tourist-concentration spots in places like Dubai, Singapore and Paris.
23 How India stacks up
While it has been in the works for long—the long and contentious path of Aadhar and the questions of privacy that has stalked its implementation down the years is only the more (in)famous example—India Stack probably proved its mettle during the pandemic, when India executed a massive vaccination drive on its digital backbone.
But the title India Stack itself is nothing but an expansive umbrella covering the open source platforms that acts as enabler of bringing government services to Indian citizens, and covers anything from Ayushman Bharat, UMANG, FASTag and DigiLocker to BharatQR, eKYC and AadharPay.
With the IMF itself vouching that “other emerging market and developing economies could learn from the experience”, countries like Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nigeria are said to be interested in replicating the same.
24 Web of lies
While the internet has become trustworthy enough for us to conduct all our transactions, it is not without its risks. In the initial days of the internet, it started off simply enough, like that lottery win you didn’t even enter, or that generous Nigerian woman who wanted to transfer all her ill-gotten wealth to you. Upgrading their tactics, cyber scamsters now use anything from viruses to malware, from spam to spoofing, from cloning to deepfake, and of course, not to forget the trending digital arrests.
It is especially of concern to India with its billion-plus internet users, many of who are not tech savvy enough to figure out what is authentic and what is not. No wonder it is now the most cyber-attacked country in the world.
“As India becomes more digital in every area of life, cyber security is no longer just an IT issue; it is a basic need for our economy and our national security,” said Apurva Gopinath, cyber leader with Aon India, “Our challenge is now to stay a step ahead of attackers, ensuring every citizen is more resilient and informed while adopting effective risk transfer and insurance solutions to protect against any potential adversaries.”
25 The doctor will ‘see’ you now
“For decades, health care relied entirely on physical presence: patients travelling long distances, clinicians limited by geography and diagnostics confined to specialised centres. The expansion of digital technologies and the internet fundamentally changed this landscape,” said Prashant Warier, co-founder & CEO of Qure.ai. “Remote consultations, digital triage and faster access to expertise established the foundations of today’s connected-care ecosystem.”
Covid-19 was the change agent. With physical distancing a dire requirement, video consultations gained traction, and many found out, to their pleasant surprise, that it worked to a very large extent.
AI could push it one level further. “AI is accelerating the shift, enabling rapid scan interpretation, guiding clinical decisions and extending high-quality diagnostics to regions that previously lacked adequate resources,” Warier added.
26 The sutra that makes the world go round
No sex please, we are Indians! The moral police has declared thus, and from community and religious leaders to even politicians and occasional court judgments say the same. In fact, when an adult comic strip of an unabashedly sexual Indian woman called Savita Bhabhi became popular in the late 2000s, the Indian government clamped down, leading to protests over being a ‘Net Nanny’.
The reality may be a tad different—India has some of the highest consumption of internet pornography in the world, 90 per cent of it through mobile phones. And that is a mean achievement considering how many noted adult entertainment sites are blocked by India’s internet providers. One study even said adult entertainment has picked up in recent years with female viewership going up. From ‘professional’ porn content, the rise of platforms like OnlyFans, where anyone can post content and garner revenue through subscriptions has seen an entire new set of providers changing the conventional rules of the game.
27 Unique and never corny
It is the kind of success story that makes Hollywood blockbusters. A football lover who became a teacher and turned teaching into a business, a teen who couldn’t get a hotel room one cold night and decided to start a room aggregator, a bunch of friends who decided to solve a uniquely Indian need and one company which overcame so many existential crises that the owner famously referred to himself as a ‘cockroach’, alluding to the theory that the roaches can even survive a nuclear blast. All kinds of people went into the making of India’s unicorn rush—what started off as a trickle in the 2010s has turned into a torrent in the last few years, as global VC money came flowing into India’s internet economy.
The rush may have cooled off for now, but except for a few like Snapdeal and Byju’s, most players, like Zomato and Paytm, have stabilised as bona fide leading market players. They stand testament to the power of India’s internet users, the single biggest in the world in numbers (with China remaining a closed ecosystem).
28 Cunning linguists
As the internet expanded, it brought to life languages, trends, emojis and acronyms, an entire world of communication of its own. Even stalwarts of language like the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries now look to the online space for inspiration when searching for their ‘word of the year’. From the smiley emoji to multiple ones to describe your mood, the visual options have stretched from GIFs and memes to anything you want to create being just an AI tool away.
Then there are viral trends, from assigning a meaningless meaning to something as innocuous as 67 (as has been the rage this year among adolescents) to dance challenges, to shortening words so much that it is a surprise no one has thought of a dictionary of acronyms yet.
But seriously, though, the next frontier for the internet could well be overcoming of the barrier of languages. Google Translate has made progress over the years when it comes to real-time translation, while in India, the Bhashini project has seen the government tie up with the Bengaluru startup Sarvam AI to build a BharatGen large language model (LLM) for 22 languages.
29 Rise of the machines
AI’s advent has already seen a big play from two hitherto unknown players, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek. The loser? Current internet champ Google, or at least that was the general belief, until Google got back last month with its new version of Gemini AI.
While the AI battle rages, the action in India seems pretty tepid if you do not count the over use in every other business presentation and company pitch over the past couple of years. The government does have some plans to build an indigenous LLM, but at the same time, there are very real fears. Is India losing out in the deep tech scene to players like China and the US and will it forever remain an internet consumption state and not an innovator?
30 Automatic for the people
In India, 100.28 crore people use the internet as of June this year, according to the government. While that is impressive, making us the world’s second biggest digital market, it still means at least another 40 crore or so have no access to what is now increasingly billed a ‘fundamental right’.
The government does hope its BharatNet Project, if not the broadband from space scheme from the likes of Starlink and OneWeb, will be able to take access down to still unconnected remote areas. Yet that leaves the question of the last-mile device and wherewithal unanswered.
As Osama Mansoor said: “Feeding internet to people has become equivalent to providing food or shelter. On one end, there is a lot of discussion on information society, surveillance, online hate speech, digital interference and virtual domination, while on the other end, there is still a huge population reaching out to gain access.” Mansoor should know; after making his fortune designing websites and helping people get online in the early days, today, he has moved his focus to accessibility, running the Digital Empowerment Foundation, which runs scores of public internet access spaces to help those who got left behind. It is a reality, like all the other issues plaguing our connected world, as we hurtle down the highway to the next 30 years.