Phone addiction in India: what the data actually shows

The government’s 2025 telecom survey found 85.7% of people aged 15 and over had used a mobile phone in the previous three months, and 70% had used the internet. Among 15–24-year-olds those figures are 97% and 94.3%. Of everyone who went online, 92.7% did so at least once a day.

The hours come from a different source, because no official survey publishes them: Sensor Tower measured an average of 4.95 hours a day per Indian smartphone user in 2024 — 35 hours a week, by our arithmetic — and the same data put the country at 1.23 trillion hours in 2025, up 9% in a year.

The state-by-state version of this, with every age band and the survey’s own error margins, is in phone use in India, state by state.

ASER’s 2024 rural survey (649,491 children in 605 rural districts) found 82.2% of 14–16-year-olds could use a smartphone. Of those, 76% had used one for social media in the reference week and 57% for education — the two overlap, because the same phone does both.

Its 2023 round asked 34,745 young people aged 14–18 the same kind of question and found 90.5% had used social media that week. The starker number in that report is ownership: 43.7% of young men had their own phone against 19.8% of young women. A national conversation about teenagers and phones is, in rural India, still largely a conversation about a shared family phone — and a different one for girls than for boys.

In a December 2025 LocalCircles poll, 49% of urban parents said their child aged 9 to 17 spends three hours or more a day on social media, OTT video or games.

That figure is the weakest thing on this page, and it is included with its method attached rather than dropped or dressed up: A self-selected online panel, urban, answered by parents rather than children, 61% male respondents, and unweighted. It tells you what a large group of urban parents believe about their own children. It is not a measurement of what those children do, and nobody should cite it as one.

For phones in general: no, not as a clinical matter. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 classifies gaming disorder— gaming the person has lost control of, that takes precedence over other interests and daily life, and that continues despite harm, normally over at least twelve months. It has no equivalent category for smartphone or social-media use. So “phone addiction” is a description of a feeling, not a diagnosis, and anyone selling a cure for it is selling past the evidence.

Where Indian law has taken a view, it is about money rather than minutes. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 bans offering, advertising and taking payments for online money games, and its preamble describes such games as using “manipulative design features, addictive algorithms… promoting compulsive behaviour leading to financial ruin”. That is Parliament naming designed compulsion — in real-money gaming specifically, not in phones at large.

The distinction is worth holding on to in both directions. A teenager who spends two hours on Instagram is not thereby ill, and the fix for most people is a change of arrangements rather than treatment. But when gaming really has taken a life over, that is a recognised disorder with trained people to treat it, and the right response is a helpline, not a gadget.