India is home to the keenest readers of newspapers in the Asia-Pacific region, followed closely by Malaysia, a survey published on Thursday by research firm GfK shows.
Respondents to the GfK consumer survey were given a list of activities and asked if they engaged in them on a weekly basis or more often.
Results showed that 84 percent of respondents in India said they read newspaper at least weekly, the highest across the Asia-Pacific.
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Malaysia ranked a close second: 82 percent of those polled picked reading newspapers, followed by listening to music and grocery shopping from a list of activities they participated in the most during the week.
"Around 82 percent of respondents from Malaysia read newspapers on a weekly basis as compared to the Asia-Pacific average of only 62 percent, and an even lower global average of 59 percent," said Selinna Chin, managing director for GfK in Malaysia, in a statement.
"In fact, listening to music is the most popular activity of global consumers, where an average of 76 percent said they do it weekly or more, followed by shopping for groceries (70 percent) then reading newspapers (59 percent)," she said.
India, the world's second most populous nation with about 1.24 billion people, has a culture of encouraging lively debate and media discussion. It has numerous print and online newspapers available to consumers – the Hindustan Times and the Times of India are just two examples.
The country's newspaper industry is enjoying rising circulation from new readers at a time when their counterparts in the U.S. and Europe have seen circulation numbers fall.
(Read more: India's newspapers shrug off industry woes)
Malaysia, Southeast Asia's third largest economy, also has a number of newspapers in circulation.
English-language newspapers, the New Strait Times and The Star are two well-known newspapers the website Newspaperindex.com has in a list of popular print and online newspapers in Malaysia.
In Singapore meanwhile, 75 percent of respondents to the GfK survey said reading newspapers were the activity they participated in the most on a weekly basis. This compared with 62 percent in China and Japan.
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GfK polled more than 40,000 consumers aged 15 and above across 28 countries, including 11 from the Asia-Pacific region. Approximately 1,500 respondents per market were surveyed on their attitudes, behaviors and values across a range of topics.
The survey results were drawn from an in-depth analysis of GfK's consumer trends survey conducted earlier this year.
— CNBC.Com's Dhara Ranasinghe; Follow her on Twitter @DharaCNBC