The metamorphosis of India from a semi-feudal to modern country is well captured in the just-released Indian Readership Survey (IRS), which maps Indian consumers and their media consumption habits.

Critics of the ‘India Shining’ slogan will feel vindicated by the news that the divide between urban and rural India is widening and that economic growth in metros is more pronounced than in villages. Rural households are also getting smaller as the children migrate to cities in search of better opportunities, according to the survey released by the Media Research Users Council and collated by Hansa Research. The survey gathers its data by speaking with about 2.5 lakh respondents over a period of 10 months every year.

For media, these trends have important takeaways. The total population has grown by 92 million since 2003 and the media audience has gone up by 86 million. At the head of this growth are cable & satellite TV and FM radio, which recorded growth rates of 40 per cent and 64 per cent respectively.

The higher income classes have grown faster in Class-I towns (with population of 10 lakh and above) while lower income categories have grown faster in Class-II towns (with population below 10 lakh but above 1.5 lakh), indicating that different media genres and media plans will drive growth in these categories of towns.The media will grow accordingly. While radio and tabloids will dominate the growth in Class-II centres, cable TV and internet are projected to grow faster in Class-I towns.

Rapid urbanisation is also evident as the urban growth rate is twice that of rural India. Urban India grew 15 per cent since 2003 compared to rural’s 6.5 per cent. Within this rapid urbanisation is the worrying trend that there is concentration of the working population at the two opposite income poles.