The Hindu Business Line : Household assets: Ownership pattern

Assuming an average bicycle is made to last for seven years, this would mean that replacement demand alone would add up to around 12 million bicycles each year.

The proportion of households owning a bicycle varies from a high of around 70 per cent for Punjab and UP to a low of around 30 per cent for Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala and J&K.

For Goa, this deficiency is compensated for by the high proportion of households owning motorcycle, moped or scooter: 38.7 per cent, significantly higher than the all-India figure of 11.7 per cent.

More than 31 per cent of households in Punjab own two-wheelers. The total number of two-wheelers owned by households exceeds 22 million. More than a third of all Indian households own a radio or transistor, a little higher than the 30 per cent who own TV sets.

Here again, there is a wide variation between States. Sixty five per cent of households in J&K own a radio or transistor, and about 60 per cent of those in Kerala and Goa. Madhya Pradesh comes at the bottom of this list; only one in every five households there owns a radio or a transistor.

However, 30 per cent of households in Madhya Pradesh own a TV set. TV ownership ranges from a high of 67.7 per cent for households in Punjab to a low of 9.1 per cent for households in Bihar.

Only about one in 10 Bihar households has electricity connection. So, if the TV ownership figure for Bihar is correct, this would mean that practically every household in Bihar that has an electricity connection also has a TV set. However, about 28 per cent of households in Bihar own a radio or transistor.

Given the paucity of electricity connection, this would mean that about two thirds of these are battery operated. The total number of TV sets owned by households in India is around 60 million, and the total number of radios/transistors 67 million.

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