TelecomLive January-2019

New India@75 Telecom LIVE January 2019 54 www.telecomlive.com speed internet. Although the project has lagged behind its original timelines but significant progress has beenmade in the past two years. As of Feb 4, 2018, under BharatNet, work had started in 1.24 lakh GPs of which 1.08 lakh GPs were service ready. The targeted timeline to connect the remaining 150,000 GPs isMar 2019, the papermentioned. Furthermore, the National Infor- mation Infrastructure (NII) will ensure the integration of the net- works and cloud infrastructure to provide high-speed connectivity to various government departments up to the panchayat level. The com- ponents of NII include networks such as the State Wide Area Net- work (SWAN), National Knowledge Network (NKN), BharatNet, Gov- ernment User Network (GUN) and theMeghRaj Cloud. The government also launched t h e P u b l i c I n t e r n e t A c c e s s Programme to make 250,000 com- mon Service centres (CSCs) opera- tional at the grampanchayat level to deliver government services Online. Under this programme, 150,000 post offices will be converted into multi-service centres. The last mile connectivity, through Wi-Fi or any other suitable broadband technology, is to be pro- vided at all GPs in the country, funded by the Universal Service ObligationFund (USOF). The paper also describes various constraints which need to be addressed to unleash the full bene- fits of digital connectivity in India and which fall under five major areas. Firstly, in the broadband connectivity, Internet access is plagued by issues related to quality and reliability, outages, call drops and weak signals. The current defi- nition of broadband of 512 kbps speed is inadequate and not in line with the expected rise in demand in the future and existing networks have been strained by limited spec- trum availability and usage, affect- ing provision of quality services. Second is in the space of Digital access and literacy, a significant portion of our population does not have access to devices such as laptops, computers, smartphones, etc. Also, digital literacy in India is estimated to be less than 10 pc of the population. Third is about the content in Indian languages, today, most digital content is in English. How- ever, a KPMG report suggested that “9 out of 10 new internet users in India over the next 5 years are likely to be Indian language users”. Fourth is about the availability of e-services. Today a large number of e-services are not available on the digital platform and there is wide variation across states in the avail- ability of citizen e-services. Cur- rently, citizens have to physically visit government offices to access most government-to-citizen (G2C) services, as municipalities and other govt bodies have been slow to digitize their processes. Fifth is about the Cyber security, where the paper highlights the inadequate regulatory framework available in the space and also, hacking and denial-of-service attacks have led to disruption of services, both in the government and the private sector – banks and governments increasingly face security breaches. The paper prescribed various steps (see box) that need to be taken in the area of broadband connectivity, quality of service, access and digital literacy etc to achieve the goals of the digital con- nectivity. N ITI Aayog unveiled a comprehensive p a p e r o n t h e National Strategy for New India@75 by defining the objectives for 2022- 23 in the detailed exposition across for ty-one cruc i a l areas . The released paper underlines the rele- vance of digital infrastructure to economic growth and need to elim- inate the digital divide by 2022-23. India should aim to achieve physi- cal digital connectivity across all s t a t e s , d i s t r i c t s a n d g r am panchayats (GPs), delivery of gov- ernment services digitally by 2022- 23 and 100 per cent basic digital literacy across the country to be able to leverage the benefits of digitization. While preparing the study, NITI Aayog had in-depth consultations with all the stakeholders, viz, busi- ness persons, academics including scientists, and government officials in every vertical. Over 800 stake- holders from within the govern- ment – central, state and district levels and about 550 external experts were consulted during the preparation of the document. According to the Internet Trends 2017 report, 27 pc of India's popu- lation (355 mn) uses the internet. While this represents exponential growth compared to the 4 pc pene- tration in 2009, there is scope for improvement. The Digital India scheme launched in 2015 brought the topic of digitization to the fore- front of public discourse. Areas including construction of broad- band highways, public internet access, e-governance and develop- ment of basic information technol- ogy skills, etc., have achieved con- siderable progress under this programme, the paper noted. The scheme for the creation of a National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) was initiated to connect all the GPs of the country with high- New India@75 Niti Aayog unveils national strategy, to remove digital divide by 2023