A partnership between Google and Indian Railways will see high-speed Wi-Fi deployed at 400 railway stations across the country, making this the largest public Wi-Fi project in India. While the first 100 stations are already preparing to go online before the end of 2016, why were railway stations chosen as hubs for digital expansion and…
All 5,631 gram panchayats in the State are expected to be connected with high-speed optical fibre cables by March this year as the project, taken up by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) under Digital India initiative, is nearing completion. Already, optical fibre connectivity had been laid in 2,260 gram panchayats (GPs) providing a bandwidth speed…
One of the primary agendas of the liberalization which began in 1991 was to improve competitiveness and reduce the transaction costs which largely restricted India’s trade with the rest of the world. But a quarter century after economic reforms were initiated, this Coasean problem of transaction costs remains more relevant than ever. The World Bank’s…
Facebook’s battle with Indian regulators is turning into a public he said, she said debate as the two sides continue to fight over Facebook’s Free Basics app, the social network’s effort to bring free Internet services — including Facebook — to emerging markets. A new letter published online Tuesday by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of…
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According to a report issued on Wednesday by the World Bank, the vast changes wrought by technology have not expanded economic opportunities or improved access to basic public services in ways that many had expected. Rather, the report warned that internet innovations stand to widen inequalities and even hasten the hollowing out of middle-class employment.…
The green light on Pushpa Kaushik’s modem hasn’t come on for the past three months. When she first got internet access in her home a year ago, all the people of Lalpur, a small village in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, used to come to her house to use her computer. Some needed to check their…
In the wake of massive protests against Facebook’s Free Basics service, ET’s Neha Alawadhi and Krithika Krishnamurthy take a look at the alternative methods to ensure internet connectivity for all. How to Connect Rural India Ad-based model Mozilla, in partnership with Grameenphone, gave 20 MB free data to users in Bangladesh after they viewed an…
Over the last few months, the activism against Facebook’s free internet in India has been called “elitist” and “self-righteous.” An opinion piece in The New York Times, for instance, called the opposition “elite Indian condemnation of internet for the poor.” Most voices that have come out in criticism of Free Basics—which provides free but limited…