ToI reports a 18000 crore broadband push by government to improve broadband access to every gram panchayat. While the initiative is welcome, it raises several questions:
- Investing versus creating an environment to invest: Government spending at such massive scale has been shown to be inefficient over and over again. What are the incentives that the government can create to attract private investment in this sector? The initiative around Common Service Centers is an interesting one – what will it take for that initiative to include backend infrastructure in addition to just the centers?
- Access versus ownership: The big success story around access is the PCO. That was 20 years back – that story has been substituted by the mobile revolution, which is a story centered around ownership. Ownership creates a level of value that can not be matched by access alone. What are the incentives and policy initiatives to encourage ownership? Incentives on broadband, on ownership of laptops/desktops, applications? Broadband access targets at every district level?
- Rural versus inclusive: The exclusive focus on rural areas is surprising. The state of broadband access in urban areas is dismal, and perhaps represents the bigger bang for the buck. Why are such initiatives confined to rural areas? What will it take to make these initiatives inclusive?
There are several recommendations that the industry has put out around solving these issues – I am no expert at that. I also welcome this initiative, rather than not doing anything. However, having seen what all of us have in the mobile world, it seems like a huge loss of opportunity to not address this issue with greater force.
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good to see such news item, as they are in line with thoughts of including our population in our growth story and not always quote that as biggest problem. I am basing my understanding on “bottom of pyramid” thoughts from C.K. Prahlad. As much as I appreciate such steps as they form the building blocks, i wonder the amount reserved for this. would be very interested in if some initiative can help track down such public money spending in open..
sometime back there was a news on 40,000 cr budget for health and 10,000 cr was left unspent. TOI was questioning 10000 cr for not being spent…and i was wondering, where did they spend 30,000 cr :)..Gurgaon is a good example — 5-6 big private hospitals and 1 rotten, inaccessible civil hospital.
by enabling villages to communicate at the same speed as others, this initiative will help create new ventures..and generate good competition to mushrooming corporates in metros..
i also see it as a step to beat competition coming from low cost countries by moving to remote areas enabled through telecom infrastructure..
@ Samir
“What applications will drive adoption?” – answer to that question fortunately is unanimous across the ecosystem. Everybody understands that applications which remove pain points of Day-to-Day lives of people will drive the real b’band adoption. This opinion has been well articulated by people like Sam Pitroda and Bill Gates amongst various others and bodies like TRAI & CII (for me its the underlying philosophy of our company Citywala Infotech).
Let me briefly share some of the expert views :
Sam Pitroda in his speech at CII conference ‘Broadband India 2004’ said that e-governance, e-help, e-learning and e-new jobs should be the new dimension for broadband to make meaningful impact in India. He regretted that applications were not coming out fast enough in India. “It is not about electronic games” he said and added that the real challenge was dissemination of more education, health, e-governance, and not gaming shows, as is the case in some countries. He called for simplification of broadband application so as to impact the lives of the people of India positively.
Bill gates in an interview given to Hindustan times few years back commented on ‘next disruptive technology’ as – “Local applications developed by local community for local use…”
TRAI also identified that there is a “lack of locally relevant content and applications”
Its kind of common sense that when applications make it easier for people to accomplish day-to-day activities, broadband will automatically become a must-have in lives of average citizens. Presently most of it is just nice-to-have stuff.
what about the last mile? What applications will drive adoption?
Its Deja-vu.
After having been a part Broadband story (or hype) in 2003-04 I am not very excited about this story. The 18K figure is great… but it seems the govt might repeat the same mistake again. The mistake of not giving equal importance to Content & Applications as Infrastructure.
6 years ago TRAI, in its “Recommendations on Accelerating Growth of Internet and Broadband Penetration 2004”, had identified eleven major hurdles preventing growth of internet and broadband services. One of which was “lack of locally relevant content and applications, especially for broadband”. It further added, “Content and applications constitute the third pillar for the overall growth of internet and broadband, with the first two pillars being infrastructure for access and access device.” – Clearly these recommendations were not acted upon.
In the same year (2004) CII came out with its vision document “India’s Broadband Economy- Vision 2010” and said – “There are several gaps in the content value chain. The primary areas of concern include non-movie / music content creators, digital factories (to prepare content for use on broadband type of delivery systems) and content aggregators. From a perspective of all investment, new business formation and technical and management skills, there is a need to upgrade the capability of the industry within next 2-3 years.”
CII’s stress upon Content & Applications was also visible in their projected figures of investment required in Broadband domain ($2 Billion in 2006, $5.4 Billion in 2010), in which 40% was earmarked for Content & Applications for both the years.
All of that remained printed text.
Basically its about balancing the PULL & the PUSH for broadband. Infrastructure creates the push & content-apps create the pull. Hope those visionaries at the top understand this simple equation.
I don’t understand why the government wants to push broadband instead of Wi-Max or 3G Services. We have seen how the broadband costs in Urban centers.