Hindi
Nitanshi Goel receives an IMDb STARmeter Award
Mumbai: IMDb (www.imdb.com), the world’s most popular and authoritative source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities, presented an IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award to Laapataa Ladies star Nitanshi Goel. The award recognizes stars who are strong performers on the Popular Indian Celebrities list on the IMDb app. It charts the page views of the more than 250 million monthly visitors to IMDb worldwide and has proven to be a keenly accurate predictor of stars who are about to have a breakthrough career moment. At 16, Goel is the youngest IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award recipient to-date.
Goel stars in Kiran Rao’s comedy-drama film Laapataa Ladies and Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s biographical sports drama Maidaan. After the former’s streaming release in April, Goel ranked in the top 10 of the Popular Indian Celebrities list thrice, including reaching the top spot last week and the number one spot this week. Laapataa Ladies currently holds the No. 25 spot on the Top Rated Indian Movies list, with an IMDb user rating of 8.5/10. Goel’s earlier credits include M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Thapki Pyar Ki, and Daayan.
“Thank you, IMDb, for honoring me with an IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award,” said Goel. “It happens to be my first award for Laapataa Ladies, and I just found out that I am also the youngest actor to receive this award. I’m still trying to process that! Thank you for making this truly special.”
View Goel’s award presentation video here. IMDb users can also add web series and movies from Goel’s filmography and other titles to their IMDb Watchlist at www.imdb.com/watchlist.
Previous IMDb ‘Breakout Star’ STARmeter Award recipients include Medha Shankr, Bhuvan Arora, Angira Dhar, Adarsh Gourav, Ashley Park, Natasha Bharadwaj, Ayo Edebiri, and Regé-Jean Page. Learn more about the IMDb STARmeter Awards at www.imdb.com/starmeterawards.
Hindi
India’s telecom subscribers cross 1.32 billion in February 2026
Broadband base swells past 1.06 billion as Jio and Airtel tighten grip on the market.
MUMBAI: India’s telecom sector is ringing in steady growth once again adding millions of new connections every month while the race for broadband supremacy continues to heat up like a fiercely contested cricket match. According to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on 1 April 2026, the total telephone subscriber base in the country reached 1,321.31 million at the end of February 2026. This marked a net addition of 7.31 million subscribers during the month, translating into a monthly growth rate of 0.56 per cent.
Wireless subscribers (including mobile and Fixed Wireless Access) stood at 1,273.31 million, registering a net addition of 6.97 million and a growth rate of 0.55 per cent. Within this, urban wireless connections grew to 730.75 million (growth 0.70 per cent), while rural wireless subscribers reached 542.56 million (growth 0.35 per cent).
Wireline subscribers, though much smaller in scale, showed slightly faster growth. The total wireline base increased to 47.99 million, with a net addition of 0.34 million and a monthly growth rate of 0.70 per cent. Urban areas continued to dominate wireline connections with a share of 89.41 per cent.
Overall tele-density in India improved to 92.66 per cent. Urban tele-density stood at 150.68 per cent, while rural tele-density edged up to 60.02 per cent.
The broadband subscriber base crossed a significant milestone, reaching 1,059.05 million at the end of February 2026. This reflected a healthy net addition of 6.33 million subscribers and a monthly growth rate of 0.60 per cent from January’s figure of 1,052.72 million.
Segment-wise, mobile wireless access continued to drive the majority of growth with 996.52 million subscribers. Fixed Wireless Access (including 5G FWA) added 16.51 million, while wired broadband stood at 46.02 million.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. maintained its commanding lead with 519.64 million broadband subscribers. Bharti Airtel Ltd. followed with 364.14 million, Vodafone Idea Ltd. with 129.36 million, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. with 28.70 million, and Atria Convergence Technologies Ltd. with 2.38 million.
Together, these top five players command a massive 98.60 per cent share of the total broadband market.
In the wireless (mobile) segment, private operators continued to dominate with 92.59 per cent market share, leaving public sector undertakings (BSNL and MTNL) with just 7.41 per cent.
Out of the total 1,257.29 million wireless (mobile) subscribers, 1,177.60 million were active on the peak Visitor Location Register (VLR) date, representing an impressive 93.66 per cent activity rate. Bharti Airtel led in this metric with 99.42 per cent of its subscribers active.
Meanwhile, 14.47 million subscribers submitted requests for Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in February, indicating healthy competition and customer churn across zones.
While urban areas still lead in absolute numbers, rural connectivity is slowly catching up. Rural wireless tele-density stood at 59.46 per cent, compared with the much higher urban figure of 142.32 per cent.
Fixed Wireless Access using 5G technology also showed promising traction, growing to 11.93 million subscribers. Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are the primary players driving this segment.
The data paints a picture of a maturing yet still rapidly expanding telecom ecosystem. With total telephone subscribers now well past the 1.32 billion mark and broadband users comfortably above 1.06 billion, India continues to solidify its position as one of the world’s largest and most dynamic digital markets.
From bustling city streets to remote villages, more Indians are staying connected than ever before proving that when it comes to telecom, the country’s appetite for growth shows no signs of hanging up anytime soon.
