This seems to be one undiscoverable number that even Aryabhatta wouldn’t have any clue about, leave aside the Babylonians.

We had heard this before and we are being made to hear this again. The variations about the burgeoning number of Indians using internet seems to have confused us yet again. The annual I-Cube Report jointly published by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB, India stated that India is all set to have 121 million internet users by December 2011. However, ComScore’s last count said there are 45.5 million Indians using this medium. Though the firm has said that the number will grow by December 2011, surely it won’t triple up to match the IAMAI standards.

And to add on to our miseries, we have different agencies quoting different numbers about the total internet users in this country. Google says it is 100 million, Juxt says 70 million. Taking this in context, AlooTechie spoke to some industry leaders to understand and find out if this number seems achievable by 2011-end, and can the respective agencies live up to the numbers they have quoted?

In our conversation, some of the industry veterans, who didn’t want to be named (which is, we imagine, is because of their involvement with IAMAI), have said that the 100 million mark itself appears to be far more than inflated.

Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm, said that the IAMAI, with all due respect, in the last few years has been a little like the cops in a Hindi movie that come to the scene after the action has moved on, but it's still nice to get some numbers from them no matter how late or how quaintly sourced the numbers are.

“By our internal estimates which we've arrived at after discussions with folks at leading websites and carriers; India is already well past this number. Our estimates put India currently at about 140 million internet users and by December we should be closer to the 150 million mark than the 120 million mark. Per our estimates, we crossed the 100 million mark at the beginning of 2011,” Murthy added.

Sanjay Tiwari, CEO, Juxt, said that this number might be reachable by December 2012 (though more likely by 2013) but certainly not by Dec 2011. “We still think the current number is not beyond 70 to 75 million in India. There is no website in the country (including Google which is used by almost 80 per cent of all Indian internet users) which can claim a user base above 50 million. So, where are the other users? Pure fiction. Google is obviously ‘double counting’ users (as average ‘place of usage’ per user is 2 and they have no way of counting me as 1 user when I use internet from both my home and office). IAMAI has always flip-flopped on their numbers for reasons best known to them,” Tiwari has told AlooTechie.

However, Alok Kejriwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Games2Win says “Who cares'? When was the last time you kept hearing about the population of ABC cities in India? Or the exact number of people who own 3 bedroom homes?” According to Kejriwal, being obsessed with the denominator is passé and it is important to be obsessed by the numerator that is consumption, sales, activity etc.

According to Murthy, the biggest factor of this rise in number is mobile internet usage. “We believe over 80 million internet users in India already access the net from their mobile phones. This number soon overtake the number of landline-based net users within the next 9 months,” added Murthy. However, here again, Juxt says that Indians accessing internet on mobile phones is still only among 1 in 4 internet users. Mobile is adding ‘depth of usage’ and 8 out of 10 mobile internet users are ‘dual’ users. Only mobile based usage is low at 3 per cent with 1.8 million users.

Sanjay Tiwari of Juxt was of the view that greater and affordable access, utility, shopping search, social networking will be the factors responsible for this rise in internet users while, affordability, lack of meaningful content in languages, lack of felt need among the larger Indian masses might prove to be some hindrances.

According to Murthy, ComScore has the least reliable numbers. “ComScore is still junk, with its non-counting of mobile users and cybercafé users - for example it continues to insist there are only some 43 million-odd core users - makes me wonder if they're being paid by the television industry to under-report net numbers! Juxt, at least, doesn't pretend to be a quant metric but is useful as a qualitative set of data,” said Murthy.

“Remember Google said 100 million many months ago - and that number is probably closest to the truth, as they probably see them all on their own servers. We should believe that the number is higher than all of these - which means that there are more internet users in India than there are television sets and you should immediately begin to adjust your media plans accordingly,” added Murthy.

We are still awaiting a reply from ComScore.

Now what do we make out of all these. Is this ever possible for the industry to reach a consensus about the number of internet users in India? Possibly not, because the industry agencies themselves have been confused about the real number. Either they know it and are hiding it, or else they have no clue about it. The confusion is something that we can either love or hate, but just can’t ignore. Inviting your take on this.