PM Narendra Modi followed by most after Obama, Pope

New Delhi: With more people accessing the Internet on their mobile phones, India is set to overtake the United States as the world’s second-largest Internet market by end of 2014.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity on the Internet is, meanwhile, expanding rapidly. He added seven million new followers on Face-book in just five months, and is now the world’s second most popular leader, next only to US President Barack Obama (43.6 million followers), while his Twitter following expanded to eight million on Wednesday.

“The use of Twitter Mirror is a great example of how Mr Modi continues to connect with Indians, at home and overseas, underlining the relevance of digital diplomacy in today’s world,” Twitter said in a statement.

It said that during his visit to Australia, Mr Modi tweeted using the tool with the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as well as students from Queensland Unive-rsity of Technology.

Since his election victory in May, Mr Modi’s Twitter account (@narendramodi) has doubled in followers, adding over four million, it said. Only Mr Obama and the Pope (14 million followers) are ahead of him on the microblogging site.

The Prime Minister’s victory tweet is still the most retweeted tweet of all time from India (70,586 tweets).

The Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB International said the number of Internet users in India is likely to grow by 32 per cent to 302 million by the end of this year. It was 213 million last year. It may further rise to 354 million by June 2015.

China leads in the number of Internet users worldwide (over 600 million), and is followed by the US, that has an estimated 279 million users.

Internet in India took more than a decade to move from 10 million to 100 million and three ye-ars from 100 million to 200 million. “However, it took only a year to move from 200 to 300 million users,” the report by IAMAI-IMRB said.