Even though a yawning urban-rural divide persists in some parameters such as access to treated drinking water and within-premises latrines, the differential is fast narrowing in the case of the proportion of homes with telephones and television sets.
According to the State-level data from the “Houselisting and Housing Census”, released by State Planning Commission Vice-Chairman Santha Sheela Nair and S. Gopalakrishnan, Director of Census Operations, Tamil Nadu was ranked second after Delhi with 87 per cent of all homes having a TV set.
Driven by populist schemes under the previous regime, the proportion of homes with TV in the State has jumped by 48 percentage points from the 2001 Census, and what is significant is that there is hardly any urban-rural differential in access to the idiot box. According to the 2011 Census, 85.3 per cent of rural households and 88.7 per cent of the urban homes had a TV set.
The silver lining in an otherwise morose story of the radio's declining popularity was that at least one in three homes were continuing to hold on to a transistor set in cities such as Chennai, Coimbatore and Tiruchi.
The other growth story in the State's ICT space has been the spurt in the number of households with landline/mobile connections by 63 percentage points from 2001 level. While overall, 74.9 per cent of the homes (84.1 per cent of the urban population and 66.3 per cent of the rural homes) had a fixed phone or mobile phone, only 7.1 per cent of households had both devices.
The “landline only” category accounted for barely 5.7 per cent of homes (4.9 per cent rural and 6.5 per cent of urban), while mobile penetration was 69 per cent.
There has been little headway in bridging the digital divide in the State going by the Census, which was documenting the possession of computers for the first time. Only 10.6 per cent of homes had a computer or laptop, while 6.4 per cent of these households did not have access to the Internet.
Hardly one per cent of rural homes had computers with access to the Internet, while the corresponding figure for the urban population was 7.6 per cent.
Chennai had the highest (32.2 per cent) number of households with computer/laptops and barring districts such as Coimbatore, Kancheepuram, Madurai and Kanyakumari, the percentage of homes with the device was in single digits.
Even for a city like Chennai, the proportion of homes with Internet-connected computers was an unimpressive 19.6 per cent.
Ms. Nair said the data would provide a vital template at this juncture of finalising the 12 Five Year Plan with the convening of the Full Planning Commission due soon.
Mr. Gopalakrishnan said the houselisting operations surveyed 1.84 crore households – and an increase in the number of households by 4.3 lakh of the 2001 exercise.
About 1.2 lakh enumerators and 19,000 supervisors took part in the 45-day long houselisting Census held between June and July, 2010.
