I had network service in the apartment in which I lived for the year. The service was very shaky. It was on and off all the time. Plus electricity was on and off for the entire neighborhood all the time, at an average of once a day for a period of a few minutes to a few hours almost every day. I don't know how electrical and computer network service are in Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai (Bangalore, where I was, is now the #3 city in India), but service in Bangalore leaves a lot to be desired.

There were two internet cafes within very easy walking distance from my apartment which I used for various reasons maybe a dozen times over the course of a year. Neither cafe was very upscale. Both were thriving businesses with many customers. I never counted noses, so I can't say percentages of men/women, but since both places were marginally seedy, relatively low count of women.

Sify, one of India's major internet companies, had cyber cafes all over the city, each with about two dozen computers. Some were more upscale than others. Many women clients, but I didn't count noses.

In the upscale shopping mall I went to fairly frequently, The Forum, there was a big cyber cafe, run by Sify or another major company. A very large percentage of women.

Two corrections to my original post:

I was thinking like an American when I wrote the word 'dating.' Indians for the most part do not have a dating culture. India is in transition from an arranged marriage culture to a love marriage culture. Young kids meet and mingle in a way that their parents never did. But I don't think young kids in India 'date' the way Americans and Canadians date (and I hear young kids in America no longer 'date' the way my generation 'dated' but that's another story). In other words, young kids, the ones who use computers at cyber cafes, meet and flirt etc at cyber cafes, but I doubt whether they do so in the same way Americans or Canadians might.

Also I used the word 'entrepreneurs.' When I was in India there was a big debate about the lifespan of cyber cafes: would they survive, and in what form? The first wave of cyber cafes was established and run by individuals. When I arrived the second wave of cyber cafes was run by big companies like Sify. They were killing the little guy shops. There were many lonely little shops all over (I used some in other cities when I was in Kerala). As I wrote elsewhere on this board, individual Indians still don't have computers in their homes, for the most part. Some do, of course. But certainly not the majority. Cyber cafes will be a necessity for quite a while. In terms of men/women, women do not want to be left out of the computer revolution, so they will have to go to cyber cafes for a long time into the future if they want to participate in computer life.