Bangalore: The number of mobile internet users in the country is on the rise and India is clocked in first at the number of unique users in Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report for April 2012.

India, who was in the third position in Opera’s earlier ranking, saw a jump to the first mainly due to the rising number of mobile phone sales, conflicting with the decreasing global mobile phone sales. Opera Mini, which compresses all the browsed data in its servers by 90 percent, is very popular in India and the company itself refers to its Indian users as being part of M-GEN (Mobile Internet Generation).

“Surfing the web is getting cheaper by the day and hence we are seeing a rise in the number of users. By largely bypassing the need for expensive computer equipment and connections, the M-GEN access the web right from their mobile phones.” said the report. The recently released Cisco’s forecast also confirms this trend and projects that India will see a 58 fold growth in Mobile Internet traffic by the year 2016.

Opera also released figures about the global usage of its products. Opera Mini and Opera Mobile saw the largest growth of 47 percent year over year compared to its other products.