86.2% of young Keralites are on their phone three hours or more a day

Screen-time debate in Kerala usually runs on a single headline average. The distribution here is more useful: the cohort is not split between light and heavy users, it is concentrated. 232 of 399 respondents sit in one band — three to six hours — and a further 112 sit above it. The under-three-hour group is a minority of 55 people, or 13.8%.

For a sample that is overwhelmingly still in education, three to six hours is a large share of discretionary, non-classroom time. It does not by itself demonstrate harm; it establishes the scale of the surface on which any digital-literacy, wellbeing or public-communication programme would have to operate.

When asked to name one habit as the most disruptive, 60.2% (240) chose scrolling Reels and Shorts. Interrupting study or work to answer chat messages came a distant second at 25.1% (100). Phone-separation anxiety accounted for 8.0% (32) and late-night notification checking for 6.8% (27).

That ordering matters for intervention design. Most campus and family-level advice targets notification hygiene and messaging discipline — together the smallest reported problems in this dataset. The dominant self-reported issue is a feed that removes the decision to stop, which notification settings do not address.

These are self-reported estimates, not device-measured screen time, and self-report typically compresses extremes in both directions. The sample is community-recruited rather than probability-sampled, so the figures describe this cohort of 399 young Keralites and should not be read as state-wide prevalence estimates.

The survey also does not separate study-related use from leisure use. A respondent doing coursework through a phone and a respondent watching short-form video for four hours both land in the same band. Any causal claim linking these hours to academic or sleep outcomes needs a design this survey does not have.