We were proud to host the launch of India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy, a book by Ravi Agrawal, managing editor of Foreign Policy, in collaboration with Oxford University Press.

By 2020, the country’s online community is projected to exceed 700 million; more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. While the internet offers immediate access to so much for so many, smartphones are creating no utopia in a culture still struggling with poverty, illiteracy, corruption, gender inequality, and income disparity. The author talked about the incredible changes the country is going through as the penetration of the internet increases helped by the proliferation of smart phones and cheap data plans.