In a country of 1.4 billion people, the habit of reading a book is quietly disappearing — and almost nobody is talking about it.
Why Reading Books Is the Most Underrated Habit in India
📅 June 21, 2026 | ⏱ 9 min read | Life Insights
Picture this: It's a Sunday afternoon. Your chai is hot, the ceiling fan is doing its best, and you have exactly three hours with nothing urgent to do. What do you reach for? If you said your phone — specifically Instagram Reels or a random YouTube rabbit hole — you're not alone. Most of us do the same thing.
Somewhere in the corner of your room, there's probably a book. Maybe it was gifted to you. Maybe you bought it during one of those "new year, new me" moments in January. It's sitting there, spine uncracked, quietly collecting dust next to your phone charger and that one notebook you never used.
Here's the uncomfortable part: India produces some of the world's most brilliant minds — IIT toppers, IAS officers, startup founders, doctors — and yet, we are one of the lowest book-reading nations in the world. We celebrate intelligence but quietly abandoned the one habit that builds it most deeply.
This isn't about being "intellectual" or showing off a bookshelf on Instagram. This is about something far more personal — the slow, quiet power that reading gives you that no reel, no podcast, no WhatsApp forward ever can. And most of us are sleeping on it completely.
So why has reading become the most underrated habit in India — and what are we actually losing by not doing it?
📖 In This Blog
This post explores why the reading habit in India has collapsed, what we're silently losing because of it, and why picking up a book might be the most rebellious — and rewarding — thing you do this year.
- Why India stopped reading — and when it actually happened
- What the data says about our reading habits (it's worse than you think)
- What reading does to your brain that scrolling simply cannot
- How to actually build a reading habit — without forcing yourself
📌 Note: This blog shares perspectives, not prescriptions. Think, question, and form your own view.
📚 We Were Once a Nation of Readers — What Changed?
There was a time — not that long ago — when a book was the most exciting thing you could own. In the 1970s and 80s, lending libraries existed in almost every Indian town. People would queue up for a copy of a popular novel. Magazines like Dharmayug, Sarita, and Chandamama were passed around mohallas like precious objects.
Then came cable TV. Then the internet. Then the smartphone. And with each wave, reading got pushed a little further down the priority list — first by serials, then by YouTube, and finally by the infinite scroll of social media that never ends and never satisfies.
👉 The shift wasn't sudden — it was gradual, comfortable, and almost invisible. We didn't stop reading because we hated books. We stopped because something easier always showed up first.
The irony? We still tell our kids to "study hard" and "read more." But the adults in the house haven't touched a non-textbook in years. We outsourced reading to school and forgot it was ever meant to be a lifelong habit.
And here's the thing that should make you pause — the countries that are pulling ahead of us economically and intellectually? They never stopped reading. But we'll get to that data in a moment, and it's going to sting a little.
"Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."
— Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States
📊 The Numbers Are Embarrassing — Let's Be Honest About It
According to the National Readership Survey and various literacy reports, India ranks among the lowest in the world when it comes to voluntary reading — meaning reading done for pleasure or self-growth, not for exams. A 2019 NRS report found that only about 24% of urban Indians read books regularly, and in rural areas, that number drops even further.
Compare that to Japan, where the concept of Tsundoku (buying books and letting them pile up, intending to read them) is considered a cultural norm — and actual reading rates are among the highest in the world. Or Finland, where children are encouraged to read for fun from age three, and the country consistently tops global education rankings.
👉 Meanwhile, India spends an average of 4+ hours a day on smartphones — but less than 30 minutes a week on books. That gap tells you everything.
And it's not a money problem. Free books exist — libraries, PDFs, Project Gutenberg, government schemes. The problem is attention. We've trained our brains to want fast, stimulating content. A book that asks you to sit still for 20 minutes feels almost painful by comparison. This is the same attention crisis that WhatsApp forwards are quietly making worse — feeding us bite-sized "information" that feels like learning but rarely is.
The question isn't whether we have time to read. The question is: what are we choosing to do with the time we already have — and is it actually making us sharper?
🧠 What Reading Does to Your Brain That Scrolling Never Can
Here's something most people don't know: reading a book is one of the most neurologically complex activities a human brain can perform. When you read, your brain is simultaneously decoding language, constructing visual imagery, predicting outcomes, feeling emotions, and building memory — all at once. It's a full-brain workout.
A landmark study published in the journal Brain Connectivity (2013, Emory University) found that reading a novel caused measurable changes in brain connectivity — particularly in areas related to language processing and sensory experience — that lasted for days after the reading was done. The brain literally rewires itself around what you read.
Scrolling, on the other hand, activates the brain's reward circuit through novelty and dopamine hits — but it doesn't build anything. It's like eating chips. Satisfying in the moment, but you're hungry again in ten minutes and no stronger for it.
👉 Reading builds focus, empathy, vocabulary, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence — all at once. No app on your phone does all five simultaneously.
And empathy is the part we don't talk about enough. When you read fiction, you literally inhabit another person's mind. You feel what they feel. You understand why they make the choices they make. In a country where mental health struggles are still deeply misunderstood, this kind of practiced empathy isn't just nice to have — it's urgent.
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
— George R.R. Martin, Author
🎓 Why We Killed Reading by Turning It Into a Chore
Ask any Indian student what they associate with reading, and most will say: textbooks, exams, notes, marks. From Class 1 onwards, reading in India is almost entirely transactional — you read to pass, not to grow. The moment the exam is over, the book goes in the cupboard and stays there.
Our education system — brilliant in many ways — accidentally taught us that reading is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Nobody sat us down and said, "Read this because it will make you a fuller human being." It was always, "Read this because it will come in the paper." And so, the moment the paper was over, so was reading.
👉 We didn't fall out of love with reading. We were never allowed to fall in love with it in the first place.
This is also why so many young Indians who are genuinely curious — who love learning, who ask big questions about life, career, and identity — still don't read books. They were conditioned to see reading as punishment, not pleasure. And that conditioning runs deep. It's the same pressure that, as I wrote in another post, keeps Indian youth caught between their own passions and what the system expects of them.
But here's what nobody tells you: the moment you pick up a book you actually chose — not one assigned to you — everything changes. The question is, how do you find that book?
📱 The Comparison Trap: "I Don't Have Time to Read"
Let's address the most common excuse honestly: "Yaar, I don't have time." You work long hours. You have family obligations. You commute for two hours a day. Life is genuinely busy — especially for young Indians navigating jobs, EMIs, and expectations all at once.
But here's a small experiment: check your screen time right now. Go to Settings and look at it. The average Indian spends 4.7 hours per day on their smartphone (DataReportal, 2024). Even if half of that is work-related, you still have 2+ hours of screen time that is pure consumption — reels, memes, news scrolling, and comparison-fuelled Instagram browsing that, as I've explored before, comes with a hidden cost most of us don't account for.
Nobody is asking you to read for four hours a day. Reading just 20 pages a day — at an average pace — gets you through 18 books a year. That's 18 new worlds, 18 new perspectives, 18 sets of ideas you didn't have before. All from 20 minutes a day.
👉 Time is not the real barrier. Habit is. And habits are built in tiny, boring, consistent moments — not in grand New Year declarations.
The real question isn't "when will I find time to read?" The real question is: what am I currently doing with my time that I could replace — even partially — with something that actually builds me?
"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
— Margaret Fuller, Journalist and Women's Rights Advocate
🌱 How to Actually Start Reading Again — Without Forcing Yourself
Don't start with a 500-page classic. Don't start with something you think you "should" read to seem smart. Start with a book you're genuinely curious about — a thriller, a biography of someone you admire, a book about money, a short story collection. The genre doesn't matter. The curiosity does.
Keep the book visible. Not in your bag, not on a shelf — on your bed, on your desk, next to your chai cup. Proximity is everything. If your phone is the first thing you see in the morning, you'll reach for it. If your book is there too, sometimes you'll reach for that instead. Small environmental changes create big behavioral shifts over time.
And give yourself permission to quit a bad book. This is huge. Most people stop reading entirely because they started a book they didn't enjoy and felt guilty abandoning it. Drop it. Life is too short for books that don't grab you. Find one that does — and the habit will build itself.
👉 Reading isn't a discipline you force. It's a relationship you build — slowly, with the right book, at the right moment in your life.
And if you're someone who grew up in a small town with limited access to bookstores, know this: the internet has made books more accessible than ever before. Free PDFs, Kindle Unlimited, local libraries, second-hand book markets — the barrier to entry has never been lower. The only thing standing between you and a reading habit is the next 20 minutes you choose to spend differently.
✅ Key Takeaways
- India was once a reading culture — we lost it gradually to TV, internet, and smartphones, not because we stopped valuing knowledge.
- Data shows Indians spend 4.7 hours/day on phones but less than 30 minutes/week on books — that gap is costing us more than we realise.
- Reading rewires the brain for focus, empathy, and critical thinking in ways that scrolling and short-form content simply cannot replicate.
- Our education system turned reading into a chore — the fix is to reclaim it as a choice, starting with books you actually want to read.
- You don't need hours — just 20 pages a day, consistently, can get you through 18 books a year and fundamentally change how you think.
Remember that Sunday afternoon we started with? The hot chai, the ceiling fan, the three free hours? That moment is a gift. And right now, most of us are handing that gift straight to an algorithm that doesn't care about us — in exchange for a dopamine hit that fades before the chai gets cold.
Reading won't make you rich overnight. It won't get you more followers or impress anyone at a party. But it will do something quieter and more permanent: it will make you a deeper thinker, a more patient person, and someone who carries a little more wisdom into every room they walk into. That's not nothing. In fact, in a world drowning in noise, that's everything.
The most successful, most grounded, most interesting people you'll ever meet — the ones who seem to have a perspective on everything, who stay calm when others panic, who make better decisions under pressure — almost all of them read. Not because they had to. Because they discovered, at some point, that books were the best conversation they'd ever had.
That book sitting in the corner of your room right now — what if it's the conversation that changes something in you?
Jai Hind.
💬 Your Turn
- What's the last book you read that genuinely changed how you think — and what was it about?
- Do you think India's education system is responsible for killing the love of reading? Or is social media the bigger villain?
- If you could recommend ONE book to every young Indian right now, what would it be and why?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below 👇
If this made you think, share it with one person who needs to read this.
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Prafull Ranjan Content Creator & Observer of Everyday Life I write about the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Life, society, youth, and everything in between. |
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