eNews
‘Digital India’ working towards empowered Digital Village: Prasad
NEW DELHI: The transformative and ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme of the Government of India has started bearing fruits after six months of its inception and e-services have begun to pick up momentum and reaching the bottom of the pyramid, which is digitally empowering the people of the country.
Making this claim, Communications and Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today that the governments at the Central and state levels, industry and academia need to work in tandem to accelerate the pace of digitisation.
He was addressing the second edition of the international conference ‘i-Bharat’ organised by FICCI in partnership with the Department of Electronics & IT (DeitY) of the Ministry.
Highlighting the progress of Digital India, Prasad said more than 12,000 rural post office branches had been linked digitally and soon payment banking would also become a reality for the post offices. As part of Digital India, the government had also planned to make Digital Village across the country by linking all schemes with technology. The digital village would be powered by LED lighting, solar energy, skill development centres, e-services like e-education and e-health. To make this programme a success, District Collectors will have to play an important role.
Speaking about e-Taal, Prasad said the web portal disseminates real time statistics of the e-transactions taking place at the national and state level e-Governance Projects. He added that the National e-Governance Plan of the Government sought to provide impetus for long-term growth of e-Governance within the country.
On promoting electronic manufacturing in India, Prasad said the progressive policies and aggressive focus on ‘Make in India’ initiative have played a significant part in the resurgence of the electronics manufacturing sector. Investment in the electronics manufacturing has increased, giving a quantum jump to the sector.
Elaborating on the headway made in connecting gram panchayats of the country with the optical fibre network, Prasad said 18 states were on board and the work was on at a rapid pace. To script a success story with ‘Digital India,’ the government and industry had to look for innovative ways to expedite the process of connecting India digitally, he added.
FICCI President Harshavardhan Neotia said the Government has embarked on a reforms programme focused on making India an easy place to do business. The emphasis has been on simplification and rationalisation of the existing rules and introduction of information technology to make governance more efficient and effective. Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and Mobile number (JAM) trinity is acting as a game changing reform that is allowing transfer of benefits in a leakage-proof, well-targeted and cashless manner.
FICCI-IT Committee chairperson Debjani Ghosh said technology was changing the world and its transformative powers were evidently visible in India. New technologies were deeply impacting governance, society, and security and this year’s i-Bharat conference aimed to bring together leaders from all segments of industry and government to explore and demystify the complex technology trends and reach at solutions and execution techniques of the programs to connect India digitally. She added that the government and industry needed to figure out new solutions to speed up the process of making India digital.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
