While information technology has helped facilitate many aspects of governance in India, it is time to think outside the proverbial box
At the recently concluded Technology Sabha I got the opportunity to interact with and understand the concerns and aspirations of many of the folks who are working hard to build a better India. From these interactions and the many, many discussions that occurred over the three days of the event, I came to certain conclusions.
A major issue, raised time and again, is that no service provider will provide connectivity in rural areas. Today, SWANs stop at the block level. That’s where many CSCs in remote areas come a cropper as even BSNL doesn’t provide connectivity in these areas. At every Sabha, I have seen the delegates request the telcos present to provide connectivity in these areas. The telcos, quite reasonably, argue that it’s not profitable to provide connectivity in the boondocks where the population density is so low that it’s not profitable.
Zooming out, perhaps we need to reconsider the whole, India is a land of villages proposition. Every country in the world started out primarily agrarian and predominantly rural. Over time, they urbanized. We have romanticized the entire rural ethos, which is largely enmeshed in bone crushing poverty and a complete and utter lack of facilities. It’s time to stop doing that. India, like the US, or any West European nation or even Japan will eventually be a predominantly urban nation. We need to hurry that process along by gestating nuclei for cities so that it becomes viable for service providers to offer electricity, bandwidth etc in these remote regions. Barring that, it will always be a chicken and egg syndrome with the babus complaining about lack of bandwidth and the service providers shrugging their shoulders.