India is to embark on an ambitious scheme to provide all its 630,000 villages, no matter how remote, with broadband internet access.
The plan is to use the internet to improve education and health services in areas blighted by poverty and to help to bridge the cultural chasms that still separate India’s regions and castes. It would also enable the country’s outsourcing businesses, clustered in cities such as Bangalore, to serve Western clients from the most isolated hamlets.
The government-run scheme will focus initially on the northeast, an area in the grip of several insurgent battles, as well as the poorest tribal and border regions, which often lack reliable mobile telephone coverage, let alone the internet.
A spokesman for Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and IT, confirmed the plans yesterday. A deadline of May 2012 has been set for giving broadband access to every village with a population of more than 300 people.
Analysts say that the target is extremely ambitious. According to official figures, there are a mere 7.2 million broadband subscribers in India, a country with a population of 1.2 billion. Hardly any of those connections are in villages, where only about 14 per cent of adults have mobile phones, compared with more than 80 per cent in cities, according to government statistics. Across the world about a quarter of the population is using the internet, according to a recent UN report.
A glimpse of how the gaping digital divide may be bridged came last month when a new government-run WiMAX network was launched near Guwahati, in the northeastern state of Assam. A kind of souped-up wi-fi, the wireless technology allows internet access to any suitable device within about 10 miles (16km) of a central mast. It is well suited to remote regions, officials believe.
Assam is also earmarked to become the first state in India to have fibreoptic cables, capable of trafficking large volumes of data at high speed, installed at “village level”, according to Mr Pilot.
The national internet drive will be financed by the state-run Universal Service Obligation fund, into which private telecoms operators must pay 5 per cent of their gross earnings. It is worth about $3.5 billion (£2.3 billion). It will be spearheaded by the state-owned telecoms company BSNL, which is being asked to enter challenging regions that private operators have avoided.
There are also plans to provide satellite telephones to villages too far out of reach to supply with conventional telecoms services.
About two thirds of India’s population live in villages. Mobile phone operators are seeing explosive levels of subscriber growth, but the telecoms network still connects only about 4,500 towns and cities and 65,000 villages.
The scheme is one of several grand projects designed to drag all of India — not just the privileged elite — into the information age.
Another is probably the biggest Big Brother project yet conceived: the planned issue to every citizen, many of whom possess no documentary proof of their existence, with biometric identity cards. They will contain personal details that the project’s head, the outsourcing guru Nandan Nilekani, wants to be linked to a “ubiquitous online database” accessible from anywhere.