A residential proxy for India gives you an address from an Indian internet provider, so Indian sites treat your requests as a visit from India. Use it for jobs that need an Indian view: prices and stock on Indian stores, local search results, and checks in a single state or city.
Two facts shape the purchase. Free Indian proxies are almost all flagged: 146 of the 148 working ones on our free list were, on October 22, 2026. And many Indian cards are switched off for foreign online payments until you turn them on. Our residential proxies target India from $0.50/GB for one GB.
Which networks does an Indian residential address come from?
A residential address belongs to the provider that connects the user. RIPEstat, the RIPE NCC's routing database, shows how many IPv4 addresses each Indian network announces to the internet:
Those addresses serve a country that connects mostly by phone. India's regulator, TRAI, counted 1,010.28 million broadband subscribers at the end of August 2026. Only 48.63 million were wireline, so about 95% were wireless.
Most Indian users can also use IPv6, the newer address system. APNIC Labs measured 76% of users in India as IPv6-capable in the 30 days to October 19, 2026, against 45% in Canada.
Which networks do Indian users really sit on?
Few addresses serve very many people here. APNIC Labs, which estimates users per network from its own ad measurements, put Reliance Jio at 47.2% of Indian users in the week to October 31, 2026, about 279 million people. The chart above gives Jio 4.23 million IPv4 addresses.
Bharti Airtel's mobile network serves 28.6% and its home network another 10.2%. BSNL holds 6.15 million addresses and serves 3.6%. Numbers like Jio's only work when customers share addresses or use IPv6, so one Indian mobile IPv4 address can stand for many people.
India is the most phone-heavy of the 24 countries we checked. StatCounter counted 84.3% of Indian page views on mobile in October 2026 and 15.1% on desktop. A desktop browser profile stands out more here than in any of the others.
What does an Indian address change?
Sites read your address to decide where you are. Google's help page says "IP addresses are roughly based on geography", and your location "helps to show you nearby results". An address in another country shows you that country's version of a page.
An Indian address makes these jobs possible:
- Price and stock checks. See the prices, offers and stock that stores show to shoppers in India.
- Search results. Track rankings and local results as an Indian user sees them.
- State and city checks. See what a site shows in one state or one city, with Residential Premium.
- Ad checks. Confirm that an Indian campaign shows in India, and how.
Residential Lite targets the country at the lowest rate. Residential Premium adds state, city and ISP targeting.
What does an Indian proxy not do?
A proxy changes your address and nothing else. A site that forbids proxies forbids this one as well, and its rules apply to your work. Detection services also list residential proxies: MaxMind's Anonymous IP database has a flag for them. Our guide to how websites detect proxies explains the other checks.
Why do free Indian proxies fail?
Our collector reads the free proxy lists published online. Since May 13, 2026, we have seen 10,137 Indian addresses on those lists, and 4,807 ever worked. On October 22, 148 were working:
Unlike Canada's, most free Indian proxies did not run on cloud servers. They sat on small local providers, yet the reputation check had flagged almost every one. A free proxy is fine for testing your code. Our free proxy list for India shows the working ones, and our page on Indian proxies covers the paid options.
How do you pay from India?
Card payments from India often fail for a simple reason. Under a 2020 rule of the Reserve Bank of India, new cards work only at ATMs and shops inside India. Online and international payments stay off until the cardholder switches them on, and banks must let you do that at any time.
So you have two ways to pay:
- Card, from $10. Switch on online and international use in your bank's app first, then pay.
- Crypto, from $3. No card is involved. Our guide to buying proxies with crypto shows what each network charges to send a payment.
Both top up one balance, and the balance never expires. PayPal is not offered at our checkout.
How much traffic does an Indian job need?
Size it from the pages you load. HTTP Archive's Web Almanac 2024 measured the median desktop page at 2,652 KB and the median mobile page at 2,311 KB. One GB therefore covers roughly 380 full desktop page loads.
A job that skips images and scripts needs far less. Load twenty typical pages through the proxy, read the traffic it used in the dashboard, and multiply.
Which one should you buy?
For most Indian jobs, buy Residential Lite with India as the country, from $0.50/GB for one GB and $0.44 per GB at volume. Free Indian proxies lose: almost all are flagged. Choose Residential Premium, from $1.00/GB, when the job needs a state, a city or a provider, or a sticky session of up to 24 hours. Our residential proxies page has the full price list.
What this page could not check
- We tested no speed, success rate or block rate, on any network, ours included.
- We do not publish which Indian networks our own exits come from, or how many there are.
- Announced address space is not a count of users.
- TRAI's and the RBI's texts were read through a search engine, because the TRAI site's certificate was reported revoked on our PC.
- The free proxy figures come from one day and one IP reputation check.
- APNIC's user numbers are estimates from its ad measurements, and StatCounter counts page views on the sites that use its tag.
- We will check every number on this page again by January 22, 2027.
Sources
- APNIC Labs, estimated users per network, India, 7 days to October 31, 2026, read November 2, 2026.
- StatCounter Global Stats, desktop vs mobile vs tablet market share, India, October 2026, read November 2, 2026.
- RIPE NCC, RIPEstat routing-status and as-overview data, read October 22, 2026.
- TRAI, Press Release No. 125/2026, telecom subscription data as on August 31, 2026, published September 28, 2026.
- APNIC Labs, IPv6 use per country, data to October 19, 2026.
- Reserve Bank of India, "Enhancing Security of Card Transactions", RBI/2019-20/142, January 15, 2020.
- Google Search Help, "Understand and manage your location when you search on Google", read October 22, 2026.
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2024, Page Weight chapter, December 30, 2024.
- MaxMind, GeoIP Anonymous IP database documentation, read October 22, 2026.
- HProxy, residential pricing page and payment options page, read October 22, 2026.
- HProxy, free proxy measurement for India, October 22, 2026.
