When work is exhaustive, commutes are long, and phones are an easy distraction, leisure reading becomes a luxury.
India has long nurtured the image of a “reading society”, a civilisation rooted in the written word. We celebrate the chaos of book fairs, obsess over the rigours of curriculum reform, and fret incessantly over the learning outcomes of our youth. Yet, beneath this performative commitment to education, a fundamental pillar of our intellectual life is quietly crumbling – the habit of reading for pleasure.
Recent data from the Time Use Survey (TUS) suggests that leisure reading in India is not going through a change in taste, but rather a crisis of time. Between 2019 and 2024, the percentage of Indians who reported reading for leisure dropped from 5.4 per cent to a mere 4 per cent. While this decline may seem statistically subtle, it represents millions withdrawing from the world of reading leisure books entirely. This is not a passing phase; it is a structural shift that cuts across age, gender, and geography.
The data present a startling contradiction and paradox. Among the shrinking tribe of those who still read, the intensity of the habit has not faded; in fact, women (69.1 minutes a day), children (77.1 minutes), and adolescents (74.5 minutes) are reading for longer durations than they did five years ago. The crisis, therefore, is not that current readers are becoming distracted or they care less. It is that fewer people are managing to remain readers at all.
The erosion is most visible among those in the prime of their lives, i.e., adults between their twenties and fifties. They are spending less time in leisure while grappling with the triple burden of modern Indian life – gruelling work hours, unstable employment, and the soul-crushing toll of urban commuting. For these individuals, leisure reading is no longer a restorative block of time; it is a series of fragments. It is also a worrying sign that the elderly, traditionally the strongest readers, are seeing less participation and less time dedicated to leisure reading between 2019 and 2024.
When leisure fragments, reading, which requires a sustained cognitive deep dive, is the first casualty. It is perhaps being replaced by passive screen consumption, a medium that fits into the exhausted gaps of a workday.
The gender dimension of this decline is particularly revealing. While women spend more time reading (about 69 minutes) than men (57 minutes) when they do find the opportunity, far fewer women now report reading at all (a decline to 2.2 per cent in 2024 from 3.5 per cent in 2019). As unpaid domestic labour and care responsibilities expand, women’s leisure reading becomes increasingly fragile and conditional. In today’s India, reading survives only among those who can afford uninterrupted personal time, a luxury that remains unequally distributed.
Rural and urban trends tell a story of paradox. While urban residents’ participation is more than their rural counterparts, participation has declined in both settings, albeit the fact that rural residents have been averaging about 62 minutes, urban residents’ time spent has declined to 59.5 per cent. This suggests that rising work intensity, longer commutes, and digital saturation are shaping daily life in cities.
A public policy of rest
Treating this decline as a mere cultural shift or a failure of moral character misses the point. Reading for pleasure is a critical indicator of cognitive well-being and democratic health. A society that stops reading tends to drift towards fragmented information and polarised, shallow engagement. When the book disappears, the public sphere becomes poorer. If we are serious about building a knowledge economy, we must look beyond school enrolments and digital connectivity.
We must address the structural forces that shrink our leisure reading time. Policies must account for work intensity and the right to disconnect. Multi-hour commutes should not be treated as an invisible part of the day. Libraries and community spaces are vital, but they are useless if the citizenry is too exhausted to use them.
India’s reading crisis is not a failure of character, but a failure of structure. We are not a nation losing its curiosity; we are a nation losing its time.
A far greater challenge to leisure reading also comes from the colonisation by short-form video through platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, which are engineered
to provide dopamine hits in seconds-long intervals. The smartphone has evolved from a tool into an appendage. Because our phones are now our wallets, maps, and offices, they are always in
our hands, thereby ensuring that the default choice for a bored mind is a scroll, not a book. Reading competes poorly with platforms designed to exploit fatigue, boredom, and emotional vulnerability.
(Palash is Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research [NCAER], New Delhi; Wankhar is a retired Government of India officer). View are personal.
