Narendra Modi’s government has been making some serious efforts to provide internet connectivity to rural areas, bring every Indian citizen online and fulfill its dream of a Digital India.
At the recent unveiling of the Union budget, the finance minister, Arun Jaitley mentioned about upping the govt. budget to Rs 100 billion ($1.4 billion) to bring affordable high-speed broadband connection to 150,000 villages in a year. He further added that they’ve already laid a 155,000km long optical fibre cable across the country for this effort.
With initiatives like “Digi Gaon,” the Indian government plans to provide free internet access to 1,000 villages in the next six months.
Apart from the government; technology giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have also joined hands to cater to the country’s 1.3 billion population, who could prove to be potential customers.
As a result of the recent partnership between Google & RailTel service provider, more than 100 railway stations in India are equipped with free Wi-Fi. 300 more stations are expected to get internet access in next three years.
Microsoft, on the other hand, aims to directly beam internet data to people by using white space (unused frequencies).
After India banned Facebook’s Free Basics (formerly known as Internet.org), the American company has been working on Express WiFi, an initiative similar to Google’s free Wi-Fi project.
India is already considered the second largest internet market, with over 400 million internet users. Using the latest budget allocations and initiatives like “Digi Gaon”, the government aims to go the extra mile to get every Indian online.
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