Sanjiv Kataria
As India completes 20 years of Mobile telephony it has many reasons to celebrate. Firstly, 900 million mobile subscriptions owned by about 700 million Indians (discounting for inactive subscriptions and multi-SIM users) are connected like never before. Secondly, by offering the most affordable call rates in the world, it offers immense opportunities in e-governance that goes well beyond connecting families, businesses, friends and customers.
If the first ten years (1995-2005) saw the magic of connecting Indians over voice and SMS, the next ten (2005-15) led to a much larger number embracing apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter almost seamlessly. These applications attracted urban youth like the proverbial fish to water. The early adopters became evangelists who helped others in the family taste new forms of connectedness.
Mobile phones and SMS literally drove the telegram out of business in 2013. And now m-banking will soon help the postal money order fade out of memory. As part of ‘Digital India’, New Delhi wants to fast-track its plan to connect every village via broadband. The natural question, then: Why not connect every Indian to the Internet?
To me, ‘Digital India’ means connecting and empowering every Indian, by enabling access and bandwidth. This promises to overcome slow momentum, and empower people, in ways unimagined as government serves its citizens like consumers.
So what does internet access for every Indian require?
Internet access for all by 2017, and broadband for all by 2020 (by that year, that should mean at least a 2 Mbps connection). Series of citizen services going online to empower citizens. Relevant content in local languages and a user interface that is meaningful even for those with low literacy. It goes without saying that internet access will have to be affordable and much of the content would need to be multimedia.
Broadband has been a long standing, and long missed, objective. After all these years, we don’t even have 20 million wireline broadband users. So what will change? For one thing, ‘Digital India’ is a program from a government with a clear majority and a strong leader who can, and often does, move fast.
Where are we today? By September 2014, India had a mere 19 million wired internet connections, but the total number of internet subscriptions was 255 million (that’s TRAI’s most recent available data, from January 2015). The road ahead is a mountain path: getting every one of a billion Indians easy access to data. That means a quadrupling of the current internet base. But a mountain path is still a path: it’s visible, and it’s mobile.
At least half of handsets owned by 700 million users are data-capable, and a little over a quarter use some form of data. With sub Rs 5,000 3G-ready handsets in the market, internet usage is growing at a dramatic pace–driven largely by a couple of apps–WhatsApp, a light version of Facebook. What’s interesting is that users of these apps quickly move on to multimedia-sharing and downloading images, music and video. And the big challenge ahead for Indian telcos is ramping up the networks so that their subscribers can use citizen services with ease.
A huge part of spectrum in India is reserved for defence use, aggravated by the varying equipment from different countries and eras-from the Soviet Union to the US, Israel and France-all requiring different frequencies. Consolidating defence needs and freeing up unused spectrum, for auction, is a critical need for ‘Digital India’.
What do other countries do? Well, they have far fewer operators per circle, for a start. In China’s 2014 spectrum auctions, China Mobile secured the bulk of the spectrum, to augment its 4G hybrid network. Most countries, including China, also have fewer spectrum blocks reserved for defence, due to homogeneity of defence equipment requiring the use of fewer frequencies.
For India, another key part would be leveraging the enormous equipment and resources, especially fibre, deployed by organizations such as the railways (Railtel), and by the government. The three-year old National Optic Fibre Network aimed at taking broadband to 250,000 village panchayats at an initial cost of Rs 20,000 crore is trudging along slowly. The progress in laying the fibre to the last mile is equally tardy. Multimedia content, and citizen services, are the other missing part this pie. Executive decisions are needed to put into place a time bound action plan to operationalize ‘Digital India’ that promises to ‘reform government systems, eliminate waste, increase access and empower citizens’. It would drive the next wave of growth, which will be knowledge-driven. Broadband in every village, with a wide range of online services, would transform India.
The last time India awakened was thanks to the mobile revolution. Can the mobile not replicate the success to grow the broadband services? The NDA regime came to power in 2014 leveraging digital outreach to the hilt. Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows the impact of new-age technologies. With all the power at his command, he should be able to switch his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio broadcast to live video streaming to every Indian on his or her mobile.
A billion Indians look forward to the day when they have affordable data access. The sooner that happens, the better it is for India. (IPA)
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