iWorld
India’s Economic Survey 2025-26 calls for age-based limits on social media access
DELHI: India is contemplating age-based restrictions on social media as the government confronts a new challenge: digital addiction among children and adolescents. In its annual Economic Survey, chief economic adviser V Anantha Nageswaran warned that the country’s rapid internet penetration, nearly one billion users, supported by around 750 million smartphones, is exposing younger users to compulsive behaviour, harmful content, and excessive screen time, which could have long-term consequences for learning, mental health, and productivity.
“Children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable,” Nageswaran said. “Unchecked access to digital platforms can impair attention spans, disrupt sleep, and affect academic performance. Policy intervention, coupled with parental oversight, is essential.”
The survey recommends considering a minimum age for social media access, while also making platforms more accountable. This could involve mandatory age verification, default settings tailored to minors, and tools that nudge healthy digital habits. At the family level, Nageswaran urged device-free hours, offline interactions, and limits on recreational screen use as part of a broader strategy to protect children’s cognitive and emotional development.
Globally, governments are moving in a similar direction. Australia recently became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, while France’s National Assembly has backed legislation restricting access for those under 15. Countries including Britain, Denmark and Greece are actively examining comparable policies. India’s Economic Survey draws on these international precedents, suggesting that similar interventions may be needed in the world’s fastest-growing internet market.
At the state level, momentum is building. Goa and Andhra Pradesh have announced panels to study Australia’s regulatory framework and explore potential restrictions for children below 16. These initiatives reflect a growing recognition that unregulated social media usage among youth is not merely a personal or parental concern, but a societal one with long-term economic and cultural implications.
Social media companies have so far responded cautiously to calls for regulation. Meta has expressed support for laws that strengthen parental oversight, yet warned that outright bans could push teenagers toward unregulated and less safe online spaces. YouTube and other platforms have also introduced content filters, screen-time reminders, and family-friendly defaults, but critics argue these measures are piecemeal and insufficient in a market of India’s scale.
Analysts note that the stakes are high. India is now one of the most important growth markets for global tech giants. Advertising and user engagement metrics are booming, fueled by low-cost data plans and widespread smartphone adoption. Yet the very factors driving growth are also contributing to what experts are calling a “digital health crisis” among the country’s youth.
The survey highlights a spectrum of risks: declining academic performance, increased workplace distraction, sleep deprivation, and reduced attention spans. It also flags psychological and behavioural risks, including compulsive use, social comparison, and exposure to harmful content. The chief economic adviser emphasised that these are not abstract concerns: they have tangible impacts on human capital and the economy’s future productivity.
While the Economic Survey’s recommendations are not legally binding, they carry weight and often shape policy discussions at the central and state levels. Lawmakers and regulators are expected to consider the implications seriously, particularly as states like Goa and Andhra Pradesh pilot frameworks to curb minors’ access to social media.
Experts argue that regulation must strike a delicate balance between protecting children and preserving access to information, creativity, and connection. Excessive restrictions risk alienating youth or driving them to alternative, less secure platforms, while too little oversight can entrench harmful digital habits. Nageswaran’s call for age-based rules alongside platform accountability represents an attempt to navigate this tension.
The debate over digital addiction comes at a critical moment. India has leapfrogged into the world’s largest online market, yet it does not have a uniform minimum age for social media access. Families, educators, and policymakers are grappling with questions that extend beyond individual behaviour to the country’s broader social and economic health.
As platforms continue to innovate and expand, introducing AI-driven recommendations, short-form video and gamified engagement, the need for thoughtful regulation and responsible use has never been greater. The Economic Survey’s recommendations signal that the government is preparing to take a more active role, nudging families, platforms and regulators toward shared responsibility.
With children’s mental health, educational outcomes and productivity at stake, India’s experiment with age limits, platform accountability and parental guidance could set a precedent for the rest of the world. The debate is only just beginning, but one thing is clear: the screen is no longer just a device; it is a battleground for the country’s future.
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
CALIFORNIA, 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.
