Health literacy for productive consumption of health information on Internet in Indian perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the need for health literacy in India. Health literacy is a catalyst that strengthens the individuals’ ability to select the right information and take proper decision over their health. For effective health literacy, the capacity to comprehend the given information and to extract right information is necessary. Nowadays, the dissemination of health messages to public is mostly carried out through Internet. The study looks at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn and their role as health communication platforms. As reported in “Mobile Internet in India 2015” released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB), there are 402 million Internet users out of which 306 million are mobile Internet users as on 31 December 2015 registering a growth of 49% over last year. Thus, the need for health literacy cannot be emphasized enough.