Over the last two years, the desire to view porn online has spiked sharply in India, the world’s second-most populous country, as measured by a survey of Google search data carried out by the business site Live Mint, which found that porn searches in India were at least seven times more frequent than Google searches for the country’s two other great passions: cricket and Bollywood.
The Google stats compiled by Live Mint line up with annual statistics released by the porn mega-site PornHub, which has listed India as the world’s third-most prolific consumer of porn for three years in a row, behind only the United States and United Kingdom, even though those two countries have more liberal laws regarding porn.
While viewing porn is legal in India, producing or publishing—including digitally uploading—pornography is a criminal offense in the country of 1.3 billion inhabitants.
India’s growing thirst for online porn has also grown exponentially despite the fact that, even with the country’s rapid economic growth, India remains one of the world’s poorest countries, with more people living in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty than any other country in the world, with the exception of Nigeria.
Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that the sudden rise in Indian porn consumption has directly coincided with the stunningly rapid growth of the low-cost wireless data carrier Reliance Jio, a company founded by India’s richest individual, Mukesh Ambani, and which has grown from zero to 200 million subscribers since 2016, according to Live Mint data.
Ambani, who has a net worth according to Forbes of $45 billion, making him the world’s 19th richest person, quickly came to dominate the Indian wireless market by offering, according to Forbes, “free domestic voice calls, dirt-cheap data services and virtually free smartphones.”
Though Reliance has since begun charging for data, its sudden rise in the Indian market drove down data prices across the industry, allowing far more Indians to get online—and check out porn sites. But in October of this year, as AVN.com reported, Reliance Jio began blocking 827 porn sites after a court ordered the government to institute a ban against online porn.
How the reported porn site blockages will affect India’s porn consumption in the coming year is not yet clear.
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